From its very beginning, psychoanalysis has had an ambivalent relationship with society. Psychoanalysis was the proponent of a new and profound critique of society; at the same time, it sought to be accepted as a respectable scientific field that offered a revolutionary and effective treatment of emotional and mental disorders.
Although the initial reception by society was cool to say the least, psychoanalysis came to have an enormous influence on Western culture, on psychiatry, medicine, and the allied health disciplines. The widespread impact of psychoanalysis varied in intensity in different places, but the new field of knowledge stimulated excitement and interest almost everywhere.
This general trend continued until the 1980s, when it became obvious that shifts in attitudes toward psychoanalysis were having profound and widespread effects. IPA President Otto Kernberg recently remarked, “The humanistic culture concerned with the development and maturation of the individual, with self-exploration and subjectivity, is being questioned by a cultural trend to immediate adaptation and social effectiveness that has led to a decrease of interest in psychoanalysis on the part of cultural and intellectual elites.”
We are confronted by decreasing interest in psychoanalysis in significant areas. The public is challenging and questioning the relevance of psychoanalysis as a discipline with explanatory power and as a method of treatment of demonstrable efficacy. These prevalent realities are well documented by studies carried out in Latin America, North America, and Europe, where the IPA has component societies. Many organizations have made efforts to counter these trends — some very successfully, others with poor results, but in general not in a coordinated fashion.
In August 1997, with the advent of the new IPA administration, President Kernberg proposed and the Executive Council approved the formation of the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Society. This new committee's central and overall function is to assist societies and institutes in broadening the interface between psychoanalysis and the surrounding culture. This interface includes the professions, universities, governments, the insurance industry, the media, and the cultural elite. The committee has begun a new venture for the IPA: It is taking the initiative in bringing psychoanalysis to the forefront in a positive way in these areas. The committee aims to counteract and to neutralize or reverse negative views of psychoanalysis.
In the first few months since its beginning, the committee has focused on identifying psychoanalysts with experience and skills in several areas of concern and inviting them to participate. This task is well under way. Simultaneously, the committee is conducting an inquiry among presidents of societies and study groups in order to construct a comprehensive picture of what is being done by the IPA and its component societies. A general idea of what is happening in Latin America and North America has already been obtained, and very soon the answers from Europe will be available. As chair of the committee, I share the enthusiasm for its potential together with the chairs for North America, Robert Michels; for Latin America, Ricardo Bernardi; and for Europe, Marilia Aisenstein.
The committee met in New York in December 1997, and there it reviewed and evaluated the data already gathered and planned for its next actions. These data give reason for increasing concern on the part of all psychoanalysts and the IPA and demonstrated the need for organized action in several areas:
We need to increase our involvement with the universities and with psychiatry, psychology, and the other mental health disciplines.
We need to establish an international network among analysts working in these settings.
We need to do more research, especially on outcome studies, and to communicate the results widely.
Psychoanalysts should be involved with the media and effectively address socially relevant and common problems and challenges.
We should focus organized attention and action on specific problems concerning the insurance industry.
We will encourage societies and institutes to counter a tendency to turn inward, leading to a progressive isolation, and instead to present psychoanalysis to the community as a living and growing discipline.
Each regional subcommittee will meet in 1998. The North American Committee will meet in May in Toronto. These meetings will pursue specific actions for each region; for example, they will share successful experiences from societies and institutes, prepare guidelines for specific settings (such as curricula and ways of teaching analytic ideas to university students), and stimulate active positions on the part of IPA component organizations.
Despite regional or local characteristics, the data already gathered by the committee confirm that the different geographical areas have many problems in common. On the whole, we are dealing with more similarities than differences in urban centers that share common concerns and in which cultures evolve toward globalization. The IPA, with its worldwide structure, can contribute to the understanding of these common problems and promote solutions to common challenges through increased communication and interaction with the various subcultures among which we live.
In an important sense, we never completely overcome the feelings of awe toward the different, the strange, and the peculiar. One of our current challenges is to demonstrate to a wide audience that in this first century of psychoanalysis, we have learned how to work in closer emotional contact with our patients and that this is the best way to explore and to develop personal awareness, knowledge, and subjectivity. In communicating to our social and cultural communities the relevance of psychoanalytic understanding to challenging social problems, we must continue to interact with and to learn from other fields of knowledge. I would include these among the objectives of the Committee on Psychoanalysis and Society; in a way, this is what the committee stands for.
Claudio Laks Eizirik is Chair of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalysis and Society. He is a member of the IPA Committee on Governance, a past member and Chair of the IPA House of Delegates, a training and supervising analyst in the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytical Society, and the society's former president. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and former dean of the medical school, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.