IPA secretary general Alain Gibeault, in his first official visit to APsaA as a senior IPA officer, delivered two provocative addresses at the May meeting in Philadelphia, one to the Board and one to the Council. Gibeault led off his Board presentation focusing on IPA membership growth, which has slowed by half in the last twenty years. Over the past five years, this rate of growth has been 30 percent for Latin America, 20 percent for Europe, and only 4 percent for North America.
The presidents of the Latin American societies have urgently requested that the IPA reconsider training standards, specifically allowing component societies flexibility in setting standards. The Latin Americans believe that a frequency of three sessions per week can create a true analytic process. Economic and cultural realities make this frequency far more practical for Latin American psychoanalytic practice, Gibeault said.
In response to the Latin Americans, IPA president Daniel Widlöcher plans a letter to society presidents saying, in part, “It is up to each Society and each Institute to decide the details of its training regulations whilst respecting both the IPA's principles and their pertinence in relation to its own programme.”
Gibeault said that the letter's wording acknowledges that an individual in different training conditions
should be evaluated for his or her own personal development instead of external factors, such as being analysed by a training analyst at a frequency of four sessions a week on different days. … Taking into account only extrinsic criteria corresponding to technical parameters runs the risk of losing the … intrinsic criteria corresponding to the aims of the analytic work.
Shuttle analysis programs are being devised for colleagues from formerly Soviet countries, Gibeault said. In the past, sponsoring analytic organizations required such colleagues to undergo personal analyses in Western countries. This drained analytic talent and enthusiasm from their native countries. The IPA's new approach is to encourage creative schemes for analyses analogous to those Freud used to analyze Americans in the early days of the profession, when foreign analysands would come to Vienna for an extended stay. Research is an essential part of these training adaptations, Gibeault emphasized.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Gibeault believes that his vision, and that of Widlöcher, employs flexible and creative training solutions that adapt in a progressive manner to current cultural, economic, and political situations. [See page 36 for a report on BOPS's response to the IPA training standards debate. On behalf of APsaA COI and BOPS reaffirmed a commitment to four-times-weekly minimum for training analyses, with exceptions or waivers granted when necessary.]
In his Council address, Gibeault covered a variety of different topics including the upcoming IPA governmental changes, the IPA congress in Toronto in July 2003, and the problems faced by analysts in the United States and Europe where government has intervened in analytic practice (e.g., the New York licensing situation).
Concluding his remarks to the Council, Gibeault said,
Between politics and science, psychoanalysis has often trodden a difficult path. At present, it can only be developed on condition that it does not close itself off into institutional rigidity whilst preserving the conditions for its practice and its transmission. … At this time of geographical expansion and changes in its structure, the IPA will have to face some of its most serious challenges, with the hope that [we can find our] way between chaos and autocracy.
TAP interviewed Gibeault after his Board and Council presentations to follow up on some of the more provocative points he made, particularly concerning training standards. Asked why he and Widlöcher are especially
Prudy Gourguechon is editor of TAP.
interested in this issue right now, he said, “It's a matter of survival. One can't ignore the 4 percent growth in IPA membership over the past five years in North America.”
Gibeault explained that the IPA sets “optimal standards” for training, not minimum standards. He went on to say that when Joe Sandler was president of the IPA, he felt strongly that the training of candidates should be conducted at four times a week as a minimum standard But the current administration believes that only the most conservative members of the international organization still feel that the IPA should promulgate four times a week as a minimum (as opposed to recommended or optimum) standard.
The IPA needs to be very aggressive in creating and maintaining an analytic presence in analytically developing countries. Otherwise, Gibeault said, “The Lacanians will steal the show.” Analysts from the Lacanian group have already created a strong presence in China, making IPA efforts there difficult. Analysts from the Lacanian group “did not succeed in Russia only because the European Federation was already there,” said Gibeault. IPA efforts to promote analysis in such developing areas must of necessity be financed by the Americans and Europeans. [Editor's noie: A fundraising appeal to support the development of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe went out from the IPA to North Americans and Europeans in July.]
Gibeault expressed his gratitude to former IPA president Otto Kernberg, who organized the dialogue that led to these kinds of efforts and made it possible to speak about issues like flexibility in standards that had previously been unspeakable.