You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The years following Sigmund Freud's historic 1909 visit to the United States were momentous ones for the evolution of psychoanalysis. At the Nuremberg Congress in 1910, with Freud in attendance, the International Psychoanalytical Association was established while the next year a devoted group of his followers formed the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The same year saw the birth of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Thus 2010-11 provided the occasion for multiple centennial celebrations, mixing reminiscence with serious reflections on the current state of the field and its prospects for the future.
The present volume is a substantial product of this commemorative activity. Its editors, distinguished both as psychoanalysts and historians, have assembled a wide-ranging group of essays that give testimony to the global expansion of psychoanalysis since those formative years. At the same time, these essays illuminate both the similarities and the variations that have evolved in patterns of administration, training and practice in response to adaptation to cultural, intellectual and interpersonal differences across nations and continents.
A massive tome of some 500 pages, the book includes reports - some brief, some extended and scholarly - from some 41 of the 93 Constituent Societies, Study Groups and Allied Centers that comprise the Association, together with statements by certain of its officers, particularly its Presidents since 1969. Clearly, neither space nor time makes it possible to condense all this material into a manageable review; accordingly, I shall attempt to highlight certain themes that emerge from this voluminous text.
When it was founded in 1910, the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) included some 200 members. As it approached its Centenary, the Association boasted some 12,000 members of all categories. This increase is due to a variety of factors, first among them the spread of interest in Freud's work among literate populat