Early in 2003, the IPA will ballot its whole 11,000 membership on elections for its new Board, which comes into being in July 2003, and for the positions of President-Elect, who will take office in July 2005, and the Treasurer, who will take office in July 2003.
The IPA follows strict procedures on global rotation of these officers. Otto Kernberg was IPA President from 1997 to 2001 from the North American IPA region. The current President is Daniel Widlocher from Paris and the IPA European Region. The Presidency for the years 2005 to 2009 is reserved for a Latin American. Hence all three candidates are from that continent: two from Brazil and one from Peru. TAP is pleased to present their invited campaign statements below.
Space limitations obliged TAP to have the IPA presidential candidates limit their campaign messages to 350 words. We appreciate their cooperation with our request and applaud their willingness to address ApsaA members in English. Muchas gracias colegas.
I have been involved in administrative work for many years, and my interest in it is closely related to psychoanalysis as science, as therapeutic method, and as an enterprise for studying the human mind. My candidacy as IPA president is in line with this interest, reinforcing my firm conviction that the IPA can and must have an indispensable role in the future of our discipline.
We all recognize the need for changes in the centralization of power and decisions. However, the new model proposed by the SAM is unlikely to attain this objective. Superficial structural changes such as merely increasing the number of committees or representatives on the board will have little effect.
Radical changes in our financial policy, in the functioning of the publications, in the organization of the research area, and criteria for appointing committee members are necessary. The Federations and elected representatives must be able to exert greater influence on the upper decision-making levels.
Our psychoanalytic training has long been addressed toward homogenization due to IPA standards and consequent to a model of psychoanalysis that tends to eliminate differences among regions.
The heterogeneousness of our psychoanalytic cultures must be respected and the demand for a single educational model must be reformulated. The transformations taking place in clinical activity must also be considered in our search for new proposals to address today's demands.
The “crisis of psychoanalysis” is occurring within the psychoanalytic institutions. New forms of organization that will foster greater evolution in terms of education and research, should be developed in order to train competent professionals.
To address the high costs of our congresses and the problems in scientific communication, a congress could be held every four years (simultaneously with elections), with bi-annual regional international symposiums. A permanent scientific department should also be set up. Special attention has to be given to our London office, to avoid it becoming an intermediate structure in the organization, subject to manipulation.