Creating New Psychoanalytic Societies and Institutes

Those of us who work for the IPA in the International Committee on New Groups experience the present and future of psychoanalysis in a paradoxical way. On one hand, we all belong to established psychoanalytic groups that share the problems of institutional rigidities while attempting to preserve the flexibility that a psychoanalytic attitude requires. On the other hand, we interact with a younger group of aspiring analysts, bursting with enthusiasm about psychoanalytic ideas and willing to make enormous sacrifices to fulfill the acquisition of this knowledge.

This latter attitude is refreshing and invigorating to analysts from cultures where psychoanalysis has lost its position of high esteem — for example, in the United States and in some of Western Europe. To acknowledge that this loss of esteem is due to such factors as economic changes, the growth of psychopharmacology, and competition from other psychotherapies does not lessen the nostalgia felt by committee members when they meet analysts who have such youthful zeal.

For us it is a challenge worth undertaking to have a second chance, as it were — to help another generation to develop psychoanalysis so that it might gain the position we believe it deserves, and that we perhaps naively believed would endure in our own countries. In Latin America, where the number and size of psychoanalytic institutes have been growing, one is reminded of this early period in the United States and Europe. However, the memory is accompanied by a sense of foreboding that their future may repeat the experience of psychoanalysis in the northern cultures in which psychoanalytic growth began with similar rapidity. Our hope is that by being alert to the hazard of too rapid growth by traditional means — either sponsorship by the IPA or by a component society — this danger can be avoided.

The astonishing burgeoning of interest in psychoanalysis in the former communist countries of eastern Europe and in Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Lebanon has added an unexpected dimension to the activities of the New Groups Committee in the past decade. We recognize that the Pacific Rim countries will soon have similar enthusiastic small groups of individuals powerfully attracted to psychoanalytic ideas. For example, Korea already has a sizeable young and enthusiastic Guest Study Group. We have heard about serious interest in psychoanalysis in China and Indonesia, two areas so far relatively unexplored. Although long-established psychoanalytic component societies in India and Japan have not evidenced significant growth since their founding, there is a sense that these areas, too, would rapidly develop further if there were some influx of time and money from the IPA to foster growth. A question members of the committee are often asked is, “Is it worthwhile trying to develop psychoanalysis in these new and difficult regions?”

A partial answer to that question may lie in the many innovations in the traditional training model introduced in an experimental manner by the committee. The success of these changes has given us hope that growth could occur in these regions. The challenge of devising these methods has been enormously stimulating to us, and the methods are being widely shared in the IPS. Another aspect of our confidence arises from the fact that we are not imposing rigid training structures in places that cannot use them. We tailor the training methods to the situation. In turn, we have shifted our criteria for success from the accomplishment of a fixed set of requirements to the ability of the individual to function as an analyst. This latter evaluation is made in the context of supervisory experiences, the presentation of papers, and clinical discussions. Lest it be thought that personal analysis and didactic training are being slighted, the committee has made great efforts to give them the important position they deserve.

Some examples may make these generalizations clearer. To make analysis possible where there are no training analysts within 100 miles or more (frequently much more), “concentrated analysis” has been approved. The candidate sees his analyst four times a week on two or three days instead of the traditional four days. This is not so much an innovation as it is an application of a method already employed in establishing institutes in the American Psychoanalytic Association. In supervision, a mixture of face-to-face sessions, e-mail, tapes, and telephone supervision has augmented the traditional weekly face-to-face sessions. We may soon try “concentrated supervision,” on the analogy of concentrated analysis. Didactic programs, too, have varied in their structure. There is often no clear progression from year to year; mentors are common, visiting analysts give lectures or brief courses, and special summer schools are offered with intensive work. All in all, the didactic experience is easily equivalent to more traditional models, and the supervision also achieves the total number of sessions necessary to meet IPA requirements. Although concentrated analysis is still being evaluated, preliminary results are encouraging.

The New Groups Committee has introduced these innovations cautiously and only when the usual methods cannot be applied — usually under one of two broad circumstances. First, in countries where totalitarian regimes have collapsed, an interest in psychoanalysis has followed. Although the reasons for this may seem self-evident to some, it strikes the Committee on New Groups that this fact deserves careful study because it reveals the inherent values of psychoanalysis in a dramatic and convincing fashion. Surely such a study would be of great importance if psychoanalysis were compared to other psychotherapies that seem to disrespect the unique value of the individual, which is obliterated by totalitarianism but is honored by psychoanalysis. This is but one of many places in which traditional psychoanalytic societies have much to gain from an interchange with the New Groups Committee. The second circumstance is in areas in which psychoanalytic ideas and practice are unopposed by the government, but to which they have not yet spread.

It is not surprising that those participating in New Groups activities begin to find their psychoanalytic point of view broadening and deepening. Old assumptions about training sometimes appear to be simple prejudices against innovation, and the value of the psychoanalytic point of view gains strength as it is compared with more simplistic psychologies that compete

with psychoanalysis in new areas. Divisions in theory, which appear to local societies as insurmountable, begin to look like minor differences in emphasis that can be metabolized as one seeks a more complete understanding of the mind. No wonder members of the New Groups Committee want to continue their work and remain as advisors when their terms expire. The work keeps us young and vitally interested in psychoanalysis, and it frees us to a great extent from the petty disagreements that plague our more established societies.

The innovations and their implications for the New Groups with which we are involved now, and those that will start in the next few years, have powerful and compelling significance for traditional training. The New Groups Committee always has welcomed the input of all psychoanalytic educators in evaluating our innovations, and we are delighted that COMPSED (the IPA's Committee on Psychoanalytic Education) will be studying them. We are even more pleased that at the next meeting of the Executive Council and the House of Delegates in New York, a full-day symposium, “Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Developing New Institutes,” will be held in which leading members of both groups and invited guests will consider the innovations mentioned in this article, as well as some that space does not permit me the opportunity to discuss.

Many more people can participate in the activities of the International New Groups Committee. We welcome inquiries from anyone interested in expanding his or her analytic horizons.