This summer in Toronto, at the joint scientific congresses of the IPA and IPSO, I will complete my term as president of the International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization. Over these past four years, time spent with colleagues around the world has convinced me that we all share the same inspired vision to understand the human condition; we all try to use that understanding to enlighten our patients about themselves; and we all struggle to promote excellence in psychoanalytic education.
Unfortunately, it is also true that we all squander far too much creative potential trying to assert the superiority of our provincial views of the psychoanalytic terrain. The real enemy is our intolerance of our differences, rather than the differences between our ideas.
Locally, nationally, and internationally, I have repeatedly encountered three major challenges to psychoanalytic education:
Teaching theories and methods without propaganda and indoctrination.
Including candidates in the development of their own educational policies.
Establishing methods to assess the competencies of the “good enough analyst.”
Certainly these are challenging goals, but we stand a much better chance of making progress if we stand together.
IPSO exists to help us stand together by making the analytic world a smaller place through improved communication and research efforts. Carmen Maza, editor of the IPSO Journal, is working on another volume of the journal and a redesign of the IPSO Web site (http://www.ipso-candidates.org/). At the same time, IPSO has undertaken a research project, funded in part by a grant from the IPA, to study and compare psychoanalytic training experiences around the world. Phase one of the research involves a questionnaire asking candidates about their training experiences (available at the IPSO Web site). Phase two involves cross-regional, candidate-to-candidate interviews that employ the cultural dissimilarities between interviewer and interviewee to promote greater attunement to differences. In phase three, examples of candidates' clinical work will be collated and compared with the other findings.
For eight years there have been annual IPSO regional conferences. The February 2002 conference took place in Madrid and the February 2003 conference in Athens. A space for an IPSO-sponsored workshop was provided at the (bi-annual) congress for French-speaking analysts, held in Brussels in May 2002.
IPSO is reaching out to eastern Europe by offering a professional and social framework for candidates who are often scattered and isolated. In May 2002 IPSO organized candidate meetings in Moscow.
There was a successful regional conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in September 2002, sponsored by OCAL (the Latin American candidates' organization). Candidates welcomed the idea of greater interaction between local, regional, and international candidate organizations. At the same time, IPSO's regional representatives worked successfully to increase candidate involvement in the FEPAL congress (FEPAL is the Latin American regional analyst organization). For the future, OCAL and IPSO will be working more closely together to increase Latin American, North American, and European candidates' opportunities to learn from each other.
Thanks to the efforts of our IPSO representatives and the Affiliate Council, candidate members' APsaA dues now include IPSO membership unless they opt out. Unquestionably, APsaA does a wonderful job of expanding candidates' experience beyond the local institute, out to the region; now it is important to find ways for IPSO and the Affiliate Council to work together so candidates will have exposure to the analytic community beyond our national borders.
IPSO is reaching out to involve candidates from the four IPA institutes in the United States (not affiliated with APsaA) and the Canadian training institutes. One aim of this outreach is to include all North American members of IPSO in planning for the IPA-IPSO congress meetings in Toronto this July.
IPSO came into existence thirty years ago as a reaction to the IPA's exclusion of candidates and to local institutes' excluding candidates from the administration of their own educational policies. For decades, the IPA and local institutes were at a stalemate, with neither one wanting to change its policies and risk offending the other. Here in the United States, both locally and nationally, we have led the way in eliminating such exclusionary policies by integrating candidates into psychoanalytic organizational life. The Affiliate Council is a prime example.
Beyond our own North American borders, this tendency to keep candidates apart from the development and implementation of their own educational policies is beginning to show signs of change as well. Based on mutual interest and a shared spirit of cooperation, a joint IPSO-IPA work group was formed a year ago to explore ways the two organizations can work together more closely. In London last summer, regional representatives from IPSO and the IPA developed a formal series of proposals for greater cooperation between both organizations. In January 2003, the IPA council reviewed and voted on these proposals. In an historical decision, the IPA approved the creation of a standing committee as a liaison with IPSO. The council voted to approve financial support for IPSO as well. In the future, we will be working together more closely than ever before.
In one instance, of necessity, this closer working relationship is already in place. For the 2003 Congress meetings in Toronto, the IPA compressed its customary nine days of meetings into a five-day program, which in turn had a significant impact on planning IPSO's pre-congress meetings: After thirty years of planning our meetings separately IPSO and the IPA have joined together to coordinate and combine the IPSO pre-congress, the IPA training analyst pre-congress, and the IPA congress. At the helm of the Program Committee for IPSO is Virginia Youngren from Boston. For the first time, candidates and graduate analysts will have the same-colored badges. Candidates and training analysts will still have some separate meetings, but everyone will have access to a greater variety of presentation and
Lee S. Jaffe, Ph.D., is president of the International Psychoanalytic Studies Organization. He is a member of JAPA's and TAP's editorial boards and the BOPS Project 2000 team. He is on the faculty of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
discussion formats. The new structure will encourage more integration at different levels of training and a richer dialogue. It will also implicitly encourage the attitude that being a psychoanalyst is about a lifetime of learning rather than about becoming an expert.
More than eighty years ago, in his essay “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” Freud talked about his reasons for creating an international psychoanalytic organization. “I created the IPA,” he wrote, “so the supporters of psychoanalysis should come together for friendly communications with one another and mutual support,” Given Freud's words, this new organization of the scientific meetings in Toronto is consistent with his original vision of the IPA itself. Why? Because candidates are clearly amongst the greatest supporters of psychoanalysis.
Let me share a dream with you: IPSO and IPA, along with regional and local psychoanalytic organizations for both candidates and graduates, join together so that candidates, graduate analysts, and training analysts will work together with a shared love for psychoanalysis. This is a vision of mutual respect, not an ideal of becoming one happy family. I believe we need each other's psychoanalytic perspectives, lest we become so indoctrinated with our own beloved ideas, so blinded by our narcissistic investment in our personal brand of thinking (be it local or regional), that we lose the very creative potential our profession demands. Time after time Freud reached creatively beyond his own ideas; can we afford to aspire to less?