The 1995 IPA Congress in San Francisco promises an exciting scientific program. The theme of the congress, Psychic Reality and Its Impact on the Analyst and the Patient Today, is deliberately inclusive and is intended to encourage a review of basic psychoanalytic concepts from various contemporary perspectives. It should accommodate significant diversity while providing common ground. There will be many more panels than usual, with brief presentations by three or four panelists and no formal discussants. This innovation in format is designed to promote spontaneous interchange among panelists and between panelists and audience.
On Monday, the plenary panel will be devoted to the topic Psychic Reality and Clinical Technique. In the afternoon, several panels will consider psychic reality as it occurs in various mental states—borderline conditions, psychosis, perversions—and in dreams. Other panels will take up the technical aspects of psychic reality as it bears upon the analyst, the patient, and both together, including a panel on intersubjectivity and a panel addressing the question, Who Maps Psychic Reality?
Tuesday's plenary panel is entitled Psychic Reality and Theory. Afternoon panels will elaborate the theoretical status of the concept of psychic reality as viewed from a multidisciplinary perspective, as viewed by various psychoanalytic schools of thought, and in relation to the issue of external versus internal reality. There will be panels also on the impact of social violence and early trauma, as well as on creativity, symbolization, the negative, and the role of pathogenic beliefs.
Thursday's panels will address the subject of Psychic Reality and the Life Cycle. The plenary, Addressing the Psychic Reality of the Child, will be followed by afternoon panels taking up in greater detail the origin of the child's psychic reality, psychosocial problems in children, the changing reality of the adolescent, and psychic reality in relation to the life cycle of women.
Interwoven into the program will be panels devoted to several major contributors to psychoanalysis. There will be panels on the work of Ferenczi, Bion, and—marking the hundredth anniversary of her birth—Anna Freud. There will also be a panel entitled Studies on Hysteria: One Hundred Years After.
On Friday a panel will consider the history of psychoanalysis on the West Coast, and another will explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and film, a topic to be taken up again at the Los Angeles Post-Congress.