What Can Members Get From the IPA?

Consumer awareness is becoming a part of the psychoanalyst's mindset. In years past, members of psychoanalytic organizations were glad just to pay their dues and felt that the privilege and prestige of membership was an honor. Other compensation was never an issue. The declaration of John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” seemed to be the ethos worldwide. Clearly, times and attitudes have changed, and national and international organizations have become more responsive to the needs of their members.

The IPA, too, has taken significant steps in this direction. With more than 9,000 members, and with a complex administrative structure, we have nevertheless launched a number of initiatives on members' benefits. The present administration, under the presidency of Otto Kernberg, is dedicated to bring them to fruition.

One of these is the Committee on Inter-Regional Conferences, created to bring to members and component societies outstanding scholars and clinicians of their choice, at no cost. It is already in operation. The background to this effort deserves some explication.

The Challenge of Social Realities

The IPA was born as an institution that would help develop psychoanalysis worldwide, maintaining the highest possible scientific and technical level, with a basically similar training procedure in all its societies. The goals were to foster, promote, secure, and develop our science in its threefold character of theory, methodology, and therapeutic technique, and to facilitate communication among psychoanalysts of the various regions.

This vision of the IPA as a frame of reference, a setting in which growth could progress in the best way, has gradually faded, often due to everyday, immediate exigencies and requirements. Today the IPA is an institution immersed in a society that is undergoing immense social and economic changes, that has elevated the values of consumerism, that has seemed to adopt more indifference than concern and compassion in interpersonal relations, and that demands fast or magical solutions. The increase of unemployment, financial uncertainties, the precarious nature of labor conditions, the lack of job security, and mounting social violence all add to the pressure on our mode of working and on our position as analysts.

These transformations challenge psychoanalysis throughout the world. Only by promoting intense scientific development to improve and further knowledge will we be able to face the constant demands. We believe that there is in our science a durability and a toughness, of which psychoanalysis itself is the cause. This arises from its depth, its ability to deal with human problems, and its capacity to elucidate new research pathways to understanding the human mind. We believe, therefore, that the basic concepts that psychoanalysis has developed in order to understand the human mind will remain firm. They are already a part of the never-ending task of illuminating the enigmas of man and woman, the repertory of truths that slowly and painstakingly configure the image of what man and woman are and of the world that inhabits them and that they inhabit.

It is in the IPA's power to face these demands and to convey to its members the certainty of their position within the current social reality. The IPA must lead the process of interrelating the institutional and scientific worlds of psychoanalysis with the society in which we live and work.

Due to linguistic barriers and problems in disseminating information, many of the leading thinkers of psychoanalysis are not well enough known outside their own regions. Moreover, many analysts are unable to travel to the international congresses. In order to overcome these obstacles and to answer our members' and societies' claims and complaints about the IPA's lack of presence, the Executive Council of the IPA has created the Committee for Inter-Regional Conferences.

The main goal of the committee is to enable IPA members to feel that in exchange for their efforts to be part of the organization, they get a space for learning and for debate and development. With projects such as this, we pursue the constant search for scientific growth and for better conditions for all our societies and our membership, taking the greatest advantage of our resources.

An Exchange of Knowledge

In his inaugural speech, Kernberg envisioned the IPA as

constituting an umbrella organization assuring our psychoanalytic identity, helping psychoanalytic societies to learn from

each other in dealing with their environment, fostering psychoanalytic science and education, providing the space for exchanging new knowledge.

That is why it is our plan to organize, according to the needs, suggestions, and ideas of all our societies, the following:

• Small conferences with prominent psychoanalysts representing different currents of thought, where various topics will be discussed in order to try to develop psychoanalytic theory.

• Free conferences for IPA members, for which the IPA will undertake the cost of bringing visitors and professors, fostering new reflection and the development of new knowledge.

• A closer contact with the academic community and the universities, organizing interdisciplinary meetings.

• Assistance to those societies with conferences already planned, so that they might increase attendance and the accessibility by local media to psychoanalysis.

• Sponsored visits of leading psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinicians, particularly to relatively isolated geographic areas.

The Committee on Inter-Regional Conferences is now organizing several events. Among them is a conference to be held in November 1998 in Vienna in collaboration with the Freud Museum of Vienna and the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna. A second conference will take place in Montevideo, Uruguay, in April 1999. We are also helping with French-English-French translations for an intercultural conference in Paris in July 1998.

The committee is collaborating to ensure that two outstanding psychoanalysts (one from Europe and one from the United States) attend the FERAL congress in Cartagena in July 1998, as well as underwriting the attendance of another two at the Millenium Congress (an independent congress sponsored by several organizations) in Lima, Peru, in April 1998. We are also studying some requests to send outstanding teachers to isolated areas that cannot afford the expense these visits involve.

The IPA is interested in contributing to the scientific life of our world psychoanalytic community within whatever frame may be most helpful, taking into account that interests and needs vary widely in the IPA's three regions. The role of the Committee on Inter-Regional Conferences is to work toward a similar access to scientific growth for all our membership and to help fulfill the IPA's goals of promoting, supporting, and helping our societies' and our members' development.