As the United Nations and its related agencies have struggled with their core mission of world peace, they have become a forum for thought and action directed to individuals. The concept of “human-centered development” is now at the center of the UN's development philosophy. The UN's transformation from a Cold War preoccupation with international diplomacy and political and economic rivalries has been, in fact, an evolution. This process has been elaborated, articulated, and now regularly adjusted through interaction with the governments and civil societies of the world.
Much of the transformation occurred through the series of world conferences the United Nations organized during the 1990s. Starting with the 1990 Children's Summit, these eight conferences dealt with children, environment, human rights, population, women, social development, food security, and habitat, providing new ways of looking at world concerns. The conferences (and the follow-up evaluation held five years after each conference) included thousands of nongovernmental organizations. They became mechanisms for obtaining international consensus and for holding governments accountable nationally and internationally for their performance, whether with regard to violence against women, use of child soldiers, poverty reduction, or global warming.
The International Psychoanalytical Association's Committee on the United Nations, created in Barcelona by the current IPA administration, has opened up an avenue of communication between members of the psychoanalytic profession and members of the United Nations and its worldwide family of agencies. It is the beginning of a long-term effort to make psychoanalysis visible in the UN system and to enable IPA members to learn more about international issues to which our profession may be able to relate. In 1998 the committee obtained “consultative status” with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO). This gives the IPA the opportunity to prepare position statements to the UN on matters relevant to its expertise and facilitates IPA access to UN meetings in the UN headquarters cities of New York, Geneva, and Vienna. Such access to the United Nations provides a two-way listening opportunity. Over the longer term, the committee hopes to identify specific avenues where the IPA can contribute psychoanalytic insights on individual behavior to the analysis and resolution of concerns challenging the international community.
The committee has a small but worldwide membership of individuals interested in exploring such possibilities. Since a great deal of UN work emanates from New York, the committee operates through a subcommittee of members in New York who meet monthly. The committee hopes to form circles of interest in Geneva and Vienna and in Paris, the seat of UNESCO. So far, the committee has preliminary, informal relationships with the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis, the IPA Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis, and the American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity. The summaries of activities below, from reports by Emily Flint, Forrest Hamer, Ruth Lax, Purnima Mehta, Henri Parens, and Harvey Rich, as well as minutes prepared by Isaac Tylim, describe briefly this young but growing relationship between our profession and the work of the United Nations.
In November 1999, Harvey Rich and Salman Akhtar participated with Jean-Guy Morriset, UN staff counselor, and Irene Cohn, representing ambassador Olara Otunnu, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children in Armed Conflict, in a panel on “Psychic Trauma and Post-Conflict Reconstruction” organized by the UN Department of Public Information and the IPA Committee on the UN. With a participating audience of some 250 from the UN and nongovernmental organizations, the panel explored the concept of psychic trauma and problems facing the international community in dealing with massive trauma of children in conflict, child soldiers, forced conscription, and rape. It also dealt with the organizational trauma experienced by workers from the international community serving in these destroyed and demoralized areas.
At the request of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, worldwide organized a Millennium NGO Forum in May 2000 whose purpose was to give an opportunity for members of civil society to discuss and make recommendations for the United Nations, governments, and NGOs in the years ahead.
At this forum, the IPA Committee on the United Nations organized a panel (Purnima Mehta, Forrest Hamer, Emily Flint, and Afaf Mahfouz) on the forthcoming World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, planned for South Africa in 2001.
Our profession can and should contribute to worldwide efforts to understand and address racial and other forms of intolerance. The convenors considered how to conceptualize the role of psychoanalysis in the deliberations of the Millennium NGO Forum. They considered roles of education — the psychological aspects of racism and racial discrimination; of advocacy — specific institutional and governmental efforts to address these concerns; and of facilitation — discussion among the various interests represented at such a forum. While all approaches seemed plausible, the first was most comfortable and most likely to be effective. Therefore, the two panel sessions sought to introduce psychological, and particularly psychoanalytic, thinking about racial prejudice into the discussion of human rights and to join with others in appreciating the complexity of ethnic identification and conflicts as they organize peoples around the world.
Afaf Mahfouz, Ph.D., is chair of the IPA Committee on the United Nations and president of the Conference of Nongovernmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations.
The presenters observed first that psychoanalysis can help synthesize fragmented perspectives about difficult human problems. Particularly relevant is the relation of the individual life course to the social, economic, and political realities that influence and are influenced by it. Second, they observed that psychoanalysis elaborates ideas about the development, constitution, and stability of the self and its experience of “other.” Psychoanalytic ideas can aid in the consideration of ethnic identifications and group conflicts involving race and ethnicity. Third, the presenters observed that psychoanalysis can stress the value of basic education concerning diversity and human rights at all age levels, but particularly in the formal and cultural education of children.
Anticipating the 2001 World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, the panel felt IPA members might best strengthen their role as educators. They considered specific ways the Committee on the UN, or the IPA at large, might engage with others in a discussion of the psychological aspects, both conscious and unconscious, of racism and ethnic intolerance. The committee's contribution to the conference would include presentations on intrapsychic confrontation with difference, the nature of identity and varieties of prejudices, the management of aggressions and hatreds, and the implications of all these for the elimination of the effects of racism and related intolerance.
The panel session was reported by Inter Press Service in Terra Viva, a publication distributed by fax and e-mail to key members of the United Nations family of agencies, donors, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide. (Terra Viva can be found online at .)
Henri Parens and Emily Flint attended a day-long meeting at UNICEF before the Millennium NGO Forum. Parens had occasion to comment on the need for prevention of violence by optimizing parenting education. Flint responded to a questionnaire for the UNICEF Working Group on Education by describing the IPA, noting its consultative status with the UN and our special interest in linking individual human development with programs relating to economic and social development for all.
Emphases of the pre-Millennium NGO Forum conference and of the Global Agenda for Children suggest that certain programs and interests of IPA colleagues relate closely to at least two of the initiatives for children as promoted by UNICEF: a program to teach parenting skills to children as well as adults and a program to study the roots of violence and develop means of conflict resolution.
During the week of June 5, 2000, the United Nations General Assembly held a special session at New York headquarters to review accomplishments worldwide since the World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. On June 7, the IPA Committee on the UN, through co-chair Ruth Lax, convened a panel on “Violence Against Women in War and Peace.” Purnima Mehta spoke of men's perceptions of women in a patriarchal society and described how violations of women's human rights affect women's psyches. Marion Oliner discussed different aspects of trauma. Regine Herzberg-Poloniecka described trauma experienced by women and girls in Kosovo. Subsequent interactive participation by women from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America provided rich contextual material for this discussion.
This is an exciting time and a turning point for the IPA. In his article “Looking Ahead at the Millennium, the American, and the IPA” [TAP 34/1], Robert Tyson concluded elegantly that “this is a time of increasing awareness of the interdependence of social, intellectual and cultural change around the world” and that the “future of psychoanalysis lies in fruitful collaboration among all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic organizations.”
Our future is also linked to our success in bringing international issues and concerns to the psychoanalytic profession. We must develop theory linking individual development to socioeconomic development in the world community. We need to consider, advise, and promote contributions that psychoanalysis can make in areas of international concern. Our goal is to convince reluctant people in the United Nations that the psychoanalytic approach should be included and integrated when we speak about any issue related to human rights, women's rights, conflict resolutions, peace, prejudice, violence, children, etc.
The committee is planning another event with the UN Department of Public Information on Thursday, December 14, 2000, in New York City during the mid-winter meetings of the American. A panel of English-speaking psychoanalysts from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin and North America will discuss work that has been done and can be done to integrate the personal development of individuals into the development of socioeconomic groups (nations, cultures). The IPA committee will pursue the themes identified above, linking up specific analysts with specific agencies, departments, and activities. We will provide information to IPA membership about UN work of interest to the IPA.