Young and vigorous, the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association today consists of more than one hundred psychoanalysts, of whom almost three-quarters are graduates of its own institute. At present the Association numbers 20 life members, 61 regular members, 11 associate members, 4 honorary members, and 11 corresponding members. Pending graduation are 12 advanced candidates, while 23 candidates are currently in training. The most recent class is the Institute's twenty-second.
In recent years the Association has mourned the loss of honorary members E. K. Schwartz, a longtime associate, and J.A.P. Millet, active since the Association's inception thirty years ago. As a representative of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Millet (who was also a founding member of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine) provided guidance in both scientific and institutional work. The Association misses Karl Menninger also, and Angel Garma, teacher and analyst of several of its founding members. Dean of the current honorary members is L. Bryce Boyer, who has provided many years of friendship and guidance. More recent designees are Horacio Etchegoyen, Otto Kernberg, and Robert Wallerstein. The Association laments also the loss of Jack Sheps, a scientific collaborator who raised funds for the founding of its Psychoanalytic Clinic.
Most of the Association's members reside in Mexico City; three live in Guadalajara. More than ten practice in Monterrey, where they represent psychoanalysis in the country's North. Analysts there have formed the Asociación Regiomontana de Psicoanálisis, or Monterrey Psychoanalytic Society, now a component society of the IPA.
At the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute, the educational center of the Association, thirty-two training analysts function as an Executive Council. Every two years they elect a director and a secretary, who are assisted in their work by six committees of three members each: Education, Selection and Admissions, Promotion, Therapeutic Services (the Psychoanalytic Clinic), Continuing Education, and Postgraduate Education, which oversees two programs, Training Analysis and Child and Adolescent Analysis.
The basic academic program in psychoanalysis is four years (eight semesters), with 1200 seminar hours of clinical and theoretical instruction, in addition to individual supervision, required for graduation. There are five tracks: (1) Psychoanalytic Theory (from Freud to the present); (2) Psychoanalytic Theory of Development; (3) Psychopathology; (4) Psychoanalytic Technique (including supervision in continuous case seminars); and (5) the Clinical Conference (attended by all candidate classes simultaneously).
Each student must fulfill a minimum 250 hours of individual supervision of psychoanalytic treatment. This training program is based on the classical triad—personal analysis, individual supervision, and clinical and theoretical instruction. A six-semester postgraduate program in child and adolescent analysis can be undertaken after the fourth semester of the basic program. Five years after graduation, analysts are eligible to apply for the program in training analysis. This program requires a minimum of four semesters of clinical and theoretical instruction and individual and collective supervision. Working in the belief that analytic training is an education in freedom of thought, creativity, and research in all areas of inquiry, the Institute is open to all trends in psychoanalytic thought.
Association members produce an abundance of scientific work. More than 600 psychoanalytic communications have been presented at over 300 monthly meetings and 34 national congresses. Seventeen years ago the Association was confronted with the need to open its congresses to other health professionals. Thus, to supplement the National Congress of Psychoanalysis, the Annual Scientific Meeting was created for members and scientific guests. The two meetings usually take place in different cities. The Mexican Psychoanalytic Association Lecture is delivered at the Congress, and the Annual Sigmund Freud Lecture at the Scientific Meeting. Lecturers have included Victor M. Aiza, Viola W. Bernard, L. Bryce Boyer, M. A. Dupont, José L. Gonzalez, Otto Kernberg, G. Lutteroth, J.A.P. Millet, Agustín Palacios, Ramón Parres, Estela Remus, José Remus, and Clifford Yorke.
Participation by Mexican analysts at the international level has been significant. Several Association members have served on the Executive Council of the IPA and on its various committees. The Association is also a component organization of FEPAL (Federación Psicoanalítica de America Latina), and three Latin American Congresses have to date been sited in Mexico. The next will be held in Monterrey, sponsored by the new IPA society there.
The Association, also a member of the Psychoanalytic Societies of the West Coast, has hosted a meeting of that organization in Mexico City. Educational activities have been expanded with the creation of a Center for Postgraduate Studies, which offers courses in dynamic psychiatry to physicians and clinical psychologists, a program in child and adolescent psychotherapy, and a masters degree program in general psychotherapy.
Association members participate actively in various mental health organizations. They have helped create such scientific organizations as the Asociación Mexicana de Psiquiatría Infantil. They are also active participants in the Sociedad Mexicana de Neurología y Psiquiatría and in the Asociación Psiquiatrica Mexicana.
Publishing is another important aspect of the Association's work, beginning with the classic Monografías Psicoanalíticas. The Association also publishes and translates into Spanish important analytic works for use in educational institutions. The official journal of the Association, Cuadernos de Pskanálisis, is now in its thirtieth year of publication.
For more than twenty years the Association has had its own headquarters, run by a competent and dedicated staff. The offices house an extensive psychoanalytic library open to the public.
The Mexican Psychoanalytic Association grew out of the interest and enthusiasm of a group of young physicians who came together during their medical studies. Their experience of Mexico and its particular mental health problems led them to adopt a psychoanalytic orientation. Official psychiatry at that time rejected psychoanalysis, however, and their efforts met with opposition and ridicule. Many decided then to go abroad for training.
Meanwhile, those who remained at home became uneasy. Afraid of being left behind in this new endeavor in Mexican psychiatry, they responded to a visit by Erich Fromm. Here history repeated itself: when the conquistadores came speaking “the language of the Gods,” Mexicans were impressed. Then, almost immediately, the church arrived speaking in Latin. Now an “ethico-religious psychoanalysis,” speaking in English, had a similar effect. Breaking this historical and behavioral pattern, a legacy of the colonial past, remains even today a most difficult task. Despite this, however, psychoanalysis has grown and developed, even in the midst of opposition and lack of understanding.
The group in Mexico were keenly aware that although the therapeutic work of analysis is conducted in the relatively isolated setting of a two-person relationship, its products emerge from the consulting room in the persons of both patient and physician. Analysts, they knew, are the only physicians who of necessity have undergone as patients the treatment they offer as clinicians; the paths of both participants, therefore, are in many respects parallel.
In any case, in the winter of 1953 Rafael Barajas, Ramón Parres, and Santiago Ramirez began to explore the field outside the consulting room. From the outset all roads seemed blocked, so the group was limited to weekly meetings for clinical presentations and discussion. Eventually Fernando Cesarman and F. Gonzalez Pineda joined the original group.
These early analysts returned to the Hospital General de Mexico, where they had trained, with the idea of creating a psychiatric service. Sandor Rado flew down to Mexico to try to help, but little came of the attempt. Not until the spring of 1955, with the return of the analysts who earlier had gone abroad, was the Mexican Psychoanalytic Study Group founded. It entered the larger psychoanalytic community under the sponsorship of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, at the Nineteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Geneva. There it was helped by Ernest Jones, Angel Garma, Sacha Nacht, Heinz Hartmann, and L. Alvarez de Toledo. Nacht, Nathan W. Ackerman, and David Rapaport had been particularly helpful in the group's meetings. In 1956 José L. Gonzalez and José Remus joined the group as analysts. At that time the group consisted of five analysts and candidates Victor M. Aiza, Fernando Cesarman, Carlos Corona, Luis Feder, F. Gonzalez Pineda, and Estela Remus.
The work of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Study Group soon made itself felt, as its members participated in important developments in the larger medical community. Two rose to executive positions in the Sociedad Mexicana de Neurología y Psiquiatría. In the medical school they started teaching medical psychology in the preclinical years. Even before this, other members had begun teaching introductory psychodynamics to medical interns, a program now included in the official curriculum.
A program for psychoanalytic training was designed for the future Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute, along the lines of recognized training institutes elsewhere, with necessary adaptations to the local situation. The first educational assignment was to complete the training of five candidates who had obtained partial training elsewhere. Requirements for candidates in Monterrey were also established.
In 1957, at the Twentieth International Congress in Paris, component society status was granted the Mexican Psychoanalytic Study Group. Instrumental here were the efforts of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, which had designated several of its members as training analysts to the Mexican group. Angel Garma's trip to Mexico, where his presence lent credibility to the work done there, was of particular help. The Association, recognized by the Mexican government as an incorporated scientific institution, was founded in the summer of 1957. The founding was celebrated with a convocation of the Faculty of Sciences of the National University of Mexico. Guests of honor were Garma, Nacht, and Rado, and, representing the Columbia Center and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine of New York, George E. Daniels and J.A.P. Millet,
By 1958 a second class, numbering eleven candidates, entered training at the Institute. Cesarman and Pineda graduated that year, with Aiza, Corona, and Feder completing training the year following. Seminars in comprehensive medicine and in development were added to the curriculum, and Barajas, Parres, and Ramirez were granted training analyst status. In 1960 the Psychoanalytic Clinic was founded.
In its development, the Association, perhaps reflecting its geographic position between the United States and South America, tended to transcend petty differences. Despite the considerable influence of the British school, the ego psychology orientation of the U.S. also found its followers. Members holding these different views have learned to live together in a climate of respect and consideration, a situation almost unique among psychoanalytic societies worldwide.
However, trouble did arise in the early 1970s, not from theoretical differences, but out of a power struggle that ended in the resignation of sixteen members. The IPA, after long deliberation and several exploratory visits, maintained the accreditation of the Association. One of the casualties of this struggle was the Psychoanalytic Clinic, whose demise was lamented by Agustín Palacios in 1982: “The Psychoanalytic Clinic, … a service to the community, was the laboratory where we learned to refine our daily work. There candidates … formulated a psychoanalytic case history and presented at a weekly seminar… . Because of the absurd power struggle, this facility was closed, and the most fruitful section of the early years of the Institute disappeared.” Fortunately, the clinic activities have since been reinstated.
Today the academic curriculum is in constant revision, with many seminars being added. These include Psychoanalytic Study of the Family, Psychoanalytic Study of Society, and more than twelve electives, as well as a research seminar for the elaboration of candidates' graduation theses.
Over the years, the Institute's teaching has been aided immeasurably by the generous participation of Nathan W. Ackerman, Augusta Alpert, Viola W. Bernard, Peter Blos, Lucy Jessner, Margaret Mahler, and Nathaniel Ross. Fortunately, however, the Institute has also developed its own training analysts. From the original five, there are now thirty-two, a situation that allows great variety and flexibility in training analyses, academic instruction, and supervision.