OR: Recent developments in Eastern Europe offer some exciting prospects for psychoanalysis. What do you envision?
JAM: The opening up of the European Communist countries to psychoanalysis is a major event, bringing to the international psychoanalytical community a sense of potential growth and expansion. In a way it recalls the days of the early psychoanalytic pioneers and their enthusiasm for spreading psychoanalysis to large areas of the world unacquainted with its existence.
When talking about Eastern Europe and psychoanalysis, I should perhaps emphasize two preliminary considerations. First, each East European country has a very different local situation and, besides having a generally different historical and sociocultural background and current political stance, has approached psychoanalysis with a different outlook. Second, we need to differentiate two distinct periods in the development of the mutual interest between Western analysts and East Europeans. One precedes, and the other follows, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the general breakdown of the Communist regimes that created geographic, political, and ideological barriers within Europe.
“There is a need for on extremely careful evaluation of the differences existing in each country.”
These exciting and unexpected political changes warrant creative new projects, which, although they benefit from experience gained during the first period, require us to reevaluate past strategies for psychoanalytic development, with special regard to those training and membership standards which are a concern shared among the IPA Societies.
Let me be a little more specific about these two preliminary considerations. The status of psychoanalysis in the East ranges from the situation in Hungary, where there is now in fact a Hungarian IPA Component Society, to the one in the Soviet Union, where there are no psychoanalysts at all and where psychoanalysis was banned. In between, countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have a handful of analysts and a growing number of psychotherapists. In most of these countries, interest in psychoanalysis was limited to a few mental health practitioners who took it upon themselves to search for training. In Russia, on the other hand, Perestroika has presented us with the unusual situation of an officially sponsored government quest for Western psychoanalysts to train people in order, as it has been put, “to help the Soviets change their mentality.”
Also, until a few months ago, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia were mainly in contact with analysts from neighboring countries—either through individual initiatives or through the European Psychoanalytic Federation. On the other hand, the Soviet Union's initial contacts were established mostly with American psychoanalysts, contacts fostered, as I have said, by Russian governmental institutions.
Regarding the second preliminary consideration, it is hard to imagine that now, as in the past, European analysts would continue to be interested only in “Mitteleuropean” countries, or American colleagues only in the Soviet Union. In this respect, we know that Russian psychiatrists have contacted many European societies, the IPA as well as non-IPA organizations, Jungians, Lacanians and so on; so that what appeared until recently to be a fairly simple panorama in which natural geographical and territorial distribution of interests and activities had been determined in a rather pragmatic way is no longer so.
To come to your question, then, what I envision is an immense, growing—but often nonspecific—demand for training. This demand calls for a very quick response on our part, coupled with a great deal of caution. There is a need for an extremely careful evaluation of the differences existing in each country: differences in information about what psychoanalysis is all about, in expectations, and in the training backgrounds of those who want to learn psychoanalysis.
OR: How do you think this response can be organized? What role do you see for the IPA, The American, the component societies, the individual psychoanalysts?
“… what I envision is an immense, growing—but often nonspecific—demand for training.”
JAM: Well, although in some countries we may at the moment be called on only to foster or respond to psychoanalytic interest, the implications for training and standards are self-evident. As you know, all sorts of scattered private unofficial projects have been going on, contributing to what seems at times to be a potentially very chaotic situation. At first these were isolated initiatives by individual analysts who, for various reasons, had links with the East, or by groups belonging to societies responding to demands for training by providing supervision and seminars. And, as you know, the boundaries between simple information giving and training and between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have not always been sufficiently clear.
We printed a note in the last IPA
Newsletter drawing the attention of members and component organizations to the difficulties caused in the past by so many people visiting East European countries with different objectives, meeting with colleagues there, giving information and advice, perhaps making promises and sometimes raising unrealistic hopes for quick and easy pathways to training; all of this has been very misleading. As long as these unorganized visits to Eastern Europe took place on a small scale, many of us probably considered them no worse than what we know goes on in many non-Eastern countries too!
But now that it seems to be “open season” in the East for anybody who is willing to bring in psychoanalysis, we need to discuss policies and coordinate strategies. Although these may vary according to the levels addressed, they will nevertheless be a crucial “imprinting” of what undeniably appears to be—whether very soon or in the long run—a pretraining situation leading eventually to the integration of new groups of analysts within the international community of psychoanalysis.
Considering the numeric potential of this near-future input in the worldwide psychoanalytic panorama, it seems in the best interest of the IPA and its component organizations that this challenging enterprise should benefit from maximum cooperation between the IPA and all its component societies. I think that an important minimal goal is the setting up within the IPA of some sort of structure to gather and update all the available information through constant reports from everyone involved. This would allow the IPA to differentiate its responses depending on the local situations and demands coming from the East and to clarify its role according to the level of psychoanalytic education addressed in order to safeguard standards and excellence of training.
We need to define a boundary between simple information, or the spreading of psychoanalytic theory, and those levels (albeit related to the previous ones) that come closer to specific psychoanalytic pretraining situations.
The latter requires the identification and evaluation of prospective applicants who want psychoanalytic training proper and the development of those institutional steps that lead to the formation of official IPA Study Groups adequately sponsored and monitored on their way to becoming component societies of the IPA.
Let me give an idea of some of the problems concerned. In the Soviet Union, for example (or even elsewhere), there might be more than one strategy. Are we to help develop dynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy, or can we already identify people who are ready for training and who would have to emigrate and then return to their own country?
In East Germany the situation is altogether different. It seems natural (because of language, culture, and vicinity) for the West German Society to undertake the training of their Eastern colleagues.
The Finnish Society has offered its help to the Lithuanians and has already accepted three, possibly four, candidates who have now emigrated to Finland.
So, regardless of whether or not some IPA members or component societies are merely going to be involved in spreading general psychoanalytic theory or will be giving seminars and supervising psychiatrists to develop psychotherapeutic skills, it seems extremely important (a) that all initiatives should be reported to the IPA and (b) that whoever is involved in fostering such psychoanalytic development in the East be aware of the IPA standards and procedures that are necessary for consideration as a potential new IPA Study Group.
Further, following the rapid increase in overall worldwide demands for affiliation, and the experience acquired in dealing with this problem, the IPA Committee for New Groups is currently developing models and general guidelines for sponsoring the formation of study groups where there are no IPA training facilities.
“But now that it seems to be “open season” in the East for anybody who is willing to bring in psychoanalysis, we need to discuss policies and coordinate strategies.”
OR: Is there anything about which we should be especially mindful as we face the expansion of psychoanalysis into new geographic areas? Any cautions?
JAM: One thing that often comes to my mind when comparing the expansion of psychoanalysis in space and time is the peculiar way in which the opening up to psychoanalysis is being viewed as part of a process of “liberalization.” We all know that psychoanalysis has been rightly considered as “revolutionary” and is, therefore, a target for hostility or proscription by dogmatic or repressive systems. But as analysts we must distinguish between external and internal events and interventions and consider their mutual interaction. The illusion that psychoanalysis is the vehicle for a widespread social restoration of “free thinking” or that psychoanalytic development should be administered and sponsored by official agencies of any sort, or submitted to local social ideological necessities, deserves very careful thinking and tactful action on our part.
In conclusion, I would really like to convey my own enthusiasm for this most challenging venture that lies ahead of us in the Eastern European countries, and for the creative potential that this new chapter in the history of psychoanalytical development holds for human development and cultural and scientific growth in our professional community.