The International Psycho-Analytic Association has been forced to levy a special assessment for the 1900 and 1991 dues years, according to Howard Schlossman, who was elected to his third term as treasurer of the organization at the 36th IPA Congress in Rome last August. The assessment will amount to $ 100 for each member and $75 for each associate member, for total yearly fees of $225 and $185, respectively, in order to build a financial reserve.
The finances of the IPA have in recent years undergone a number of drains, some unexpected but many developmental. A much-needed new home was purchased in London and then renovated, exhausting the reserve fund. Simultaneously, pressure was mounting from component organizations throughout the world for increased services. Consequently, staffing needs increased from one person to six.
Among the most important of IPA's new services is the financing of international site visit teams to maintain common ground in the theory, practice, and training of psychoanalysis throughout the world. A second new venture is the “desktop publishing,” in the four official languages of the IPA of monographs addressing major issues in psychoanalysis. Noted analysts offer their opinions on current thinking abut psychoanalytic classics. The first of the series, “On Freud's ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable‘”, was published in 1987. Regrettably, work on several others has been temporarily suspended because of financial constraints.
The lawsuit by the psychologists against the IPA APA and the New York and Columbia Institutes resulted in an unprecedented drain on funds. Not only were there legal fees to be paid, but officers were repeatedly required to travel to meet with counsel and large amounts of secretarial time were required for the preparation of documents.
The settlement of the lawsuit resulted in a major expansion within the IPA A large number of nonmedical institutes have made inquiry or begun the process of application to become component societies. Three were accepted as provisional societies at the Rome Congress, and others are pending. Site visit teams must continue their relationships with provisional societies until the societies achieve full component status, a process that will likely take a number of years.
Finally, events in Europe have made it possible for groups in the Iron Curtain countries to consider affiliation with the IPA as study groups. Inquires have begun to come in from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even Russia The Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society, which has been meeting quietly without government approval for a number of years, became a provisional society at the Rome Congress.
We are well on the way to being a fully international presence representing Freudian concepts in every country. We need the funds to do it.
Lynne Moritz