There is growing awareness among us that the serious challenges to the psychoanalytic profession and to psychoanalytic science require the vigorous, thoughtful, consistent, and dedicated efforts of our component psychoanalytic societies and associations. I believe these challenges are reflected in clinicians' concern over the decreased number of patients, the relative decreased interest in psychoanalytic training within the psychiatric profession, the impact of competing psychopharmacological and cognitive-behavioral treatment approaches, the restrictions imposed by third-party payers, and the attacks on psychoanalysis in the media. The present IPA leadership has facilitated administrative democratization. I, together with the other incoming IPA officers, am committed to furthering democratization in the context of initiating new projects to deal with these challenges to psychoanalysis. We must help each other break out of the relative isolation that has characterized many of our psychoanalytic institutions.
At a recent IPA symposium in Buenos Aires that I chaired, we enjoyed the full participation of the Executive Council and the House of Delegates. We discussed the present-day challenges to psychoanalysis in the culture, in the sciences and the university, in the community, and in our educational and technical approaches. We agreed that if we face a present crisis it is not in our science, but in our profession. But to resolve our professional challenges we will need to reinsert ourselves into the community and into the university, strengthen our contributions to psychoanalytic science, and concentrate our educational efforts to help our psychoanalytic institutes develop further into exciting institutions of higher learning and scientific contributions.
To begin with, my new IPA administration will establish a major committee structure to assist psychoanalytic societies everywhere in their efforts to deal with the challenges in their local environments, facilitating the interchange of information regarding what is already successfully being done elsewhere to influence legislative authorities, third-party payers, and the social awareness and acceptance of the importance of psychoanalytic treatment within the general community. Subcommittees of this overall committee structure will deal specifically with the attacks on psychoanalysis in the media, the need to approach influential intellectual élites to provide updated information about psychoanalytic treatment approaches and scientific developments, and with efforts to reinsert psychoanalysis within academic psychiatry, clinical psychology and social work, the humanities, and the university at large.
In addition, we will undertake a major effort to address the professional recognition of psychoanalysis within the mental health delivery systems, to study advantages and disadvantages of alliances with related professional groups, and to assure the social and political recognition—and credentialing—of the high level of training that characterizes psychoanalytic institutes that maintain the standards of psychoanalytic education of the IPA.
Another major effort of our new administration will be to strengthen psychoanalytic science and the impact of psychoanalytic science on the scientific, intellectual, and cultural environments within which psychoanalysis evolves. This effort will include financial support of formalized psychoanalytic research, be it within the field of clinical psychoanalytic studies, empirical research, hermeneutic approaches to psychoanalysis, or applications of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic scholarship, in the broadest sense. The Summer School for Psychoanalytic Research, which has successfully begun to train psychoanalytic researchers from all major regions during the 1995 and 1996 sessions, will be expanded, as will the availability of consultation services for psychoanalytic research. At present we are establishing an advisory board for assessing research grant proposals and to adjudicate such grants from the IPA.
Interregional conferences geared to intense updates of particular areas of psychoanalytic practice and science will bring together psychoanalytic scholars from various regions, and provide financial support for leading psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinicians to visit relatively isolated psychoanalytic societies and study groups. The corresponding committee has already begun to explore places, times, subject matter, and participation for a first major conference of this type.
The IPA will intensify present efforts to develop psychoanalysis in new regions, particularly Eastern Europe, Korea, and unserved areas in South America, with early efforts to extend psychoanalysis into Africa, the Middle East, and other regions in Asia. The Committee on International New Groups is expanding its activities to do justice to these objectives, which will grow in the forthcoming administration.
I will increase IPA support of psychoanalytic publications, with particular emphasis on the translation of important scientific contributions from non-English languages into English, as well as fostering publications derived from the interregional conferences and related meetings. The committees on publication and the newsletter, and a new Committee on Translations, will coordinate their efforts in this regard.
Finally, a long-needed major effort by the IPA, coordinated by the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COMPSED), will be devoted to psychoanalytic education, studying the advantages and disadvantages of alternative educational models and fostering research on psychoanalytic education. At the same time, COMPSED will stimulate psychoanalytic societies to transform psychoanalytic institutes from institutions geared only to transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge to a new generation, to educational settings that are geared toward developing new knowledge in psychoanalysis. We hope to attract the very best to our profession and our science.
I am committed to not increasing the burden of membership dues, and to generate the funds required for the programs that have been outlined by streamlining our administrative structure, and by reducing the investment in the representative and ceremonial aspects of congresses and meetings by spending more money on our relationship with the community, on psychoanalytic education, and in fostering our science, while reducing the costs of parties, celebrations, and bureaucratic overgrowth as much as possible. We look forward to a revival and reinvigoration of the psychoanalytic profession.