Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: The IJP Annuals: Psychoanalysis and Social Media - An Indecent Relationship?

The Annuals of the IJP are a useful interface between the authors of the IJP and readers who do not speak and read English, belonging to different cultures and languages such as German, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The Annuals are genuine tools with outreach potential. For this reason we think that the promotion of new Annual issues must involve the use of new media.

Here in Boston, for the first time, we had the chance to organize a panel altogether (Europeans and Latin Americans) and to share our different experiences, focused on questions about the expansion of psychoanalytic knowledge in a world where technical facilities and high speed bring a higher degree of “openness”.

Angela Mauss Hanke, Editor in Chief of the European Annuals and Moderator of the panel, briefly introduced the presenter Nilüfer Erdem and the two discussants, Gustavo Jarast and Richard Rink.

The aim of the panel was to discuss questions concerning the impact of the changes introduced by new technologies on the way psychoanalytic thoughts are presented to readers from different fields of interest, and to try to evaluate the expansion of psychoanalytic knowledge in a world of technical facilities and high-speed communication. The questions concern the future of our discipline in a changing world and it is of interest for the Editorial Boards of The Annuals of the IJP.

The paper by Nilüfer Erdem, “The IJP Annuals: Psychoanalysis and Social Media - An indecent relationship?,” presents as a core issue the question of how fast changing communication affects our approach to sharing psychoanalytic knowledge. The question of whether psychoanalysis would be appropriate and sufficient to address the world changes implies both reflections on basic concepts of the analytic setting, and theories and aspects of anonymity, abstinence an