Your NAPsaC Board—representing all the IPA groups in North America—encourages analysts to mark their calendars and plan to attend the 46th IPA Congress to be held this July in Chicago, celebrating a great American city. Moreover, the American Psychoanalytic Association has chosen to forgo its Annual Meeting in June 2009, making the IPA Congress the meeting to attend. It will bring together analysts from all over the globe to present and participate in dialogues with a variety of formats to highlight and discuss the differences and similarities among the many strands of psychoanalysis being practiced today. The activities, including pre-congress and congress events, will begin July 27 and continue to August 1, 2009.
The pre-congress will offer attendees the opportunity to participate in one of five Working Party Workshops, which, depending on the one chosen, will last from a half day up to two days in intense exploration of the clinical material of the presenter. Each will create an atmosphere of inquiry—completely absent of supervisory judgment—into the analytic process using one of the following five topic foci:
Comparative Clinical Methods
Specificity of Psychoanalytic Treatment
Initiating Psychoanalysis
Clinical Forum
Education (for IPA training analysts only).
Each workshop has a fee of $75.00 to participate.
The Working Parties sponsored at the 45th IPA Congress in Berlin were extremely well received. Analysts experienced them not only as collegial and pleasurable but as deepening their own analytic understanding no matter what their stage of personal analytic development. Participating in one of these workshops has the potential of energizing the individual working in psychoanalysis and, beyond that, of stimulating psychoanalysis itself as a field.
NAPsaC is part of the planning for these IPA Pre-Congress workshops and will continue to sponsor similar Working Parties (as they are called because they are truly work groups) with the intent to follow up on these IPA pre-Congress events as interest develops. All of the workshops are designed to combine in the groups analysts from diverse analytic and geographic backgrounds.
The congress is stressing the theme of dialogue among diverse analytic and geographic backgrounds to emphasize convergences and divergences in practice. Psychoanalytic practice, influenced by expanded theoretical postulates, is also influenced by changes in social realities and exchanges with other disciplines. Thus, the panels and papers will provide a rich diet from a menu of varied points of view. There is also an emphasis on providing an opportunity to hear from a broad spectrum of participants rather than only a select few. Although the presentations will be very thoughtful and of high quality, a given presenter may only present once in the program, as well as, possibly, functioning as a chair once.
The opening panel will consist of a presentation of a clinical case by Cecilio Paniagua (Spain), with discussants Marillia Aisenstein (France), Arnold Goldberg (USA), and Leonardo Peskin (Argentina). The moderator will be the IPA president Claudio Laks Eizirik (Brazil). Keynote lecturers will include Antonino Ferro (Italy), presenting “Transformations in Dreaming and Characters in the Analytic Field”; Juan Pablo Jiménez (Chile), “An Approach to Psychoanalysts' Practice Based on Its Own Merits”; and Warren Poland (USA), “Problems of Collegial Learning in Psychoanalysis: Narcissism and Curiosity.” The three major lecturers will be Ron Britton (UK), Leopold Nosek (Brazil), and Robert Paul (USA). The analysts invited to take part in the “Meet the Analyst” dialogues include César Garza Guerrero, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Arnold Modell, Anna Ornstein, Janine Puget, and Jean-Claude Rolland.
Other panels, small discussion groups, and courses include such topics as hysteria, borderline states, psychosis, depression, perversion, and psychosomatics as well as dream interpretation, transference/countertransference, the analyst's subjective objectivity, enactment, the analytic process, working through, the setting, termination, telephone analysis, structural change, adoption, lesbian/gay parenthood, and virtual reality in analysis, among others.
The Congress Program Committee is chaired by Abel Fainstein from Latin America, along with Monica Siedmann de Armesto, secretary general of the IPA, ex officio. The co-chair from North America is Glen Gabbard, and from Europe is Liliane Abensour, with the candidate organization (IPSO) represented by Kate Schechter. The Pre-Congress Subcommittee of the Congress Program Committee is chaired by Elias da Rocha Barros from Latin America and includes Abbot Bronstein from NAPsaC.
Chicago boasts many museums and restaurants, but don't miss seeing recent developments such as the monumental sculptures in Grant Park and Millennium Park, new buildings by the world's most renowned architects, or the new facilities of the Art Institute designed by Renzo Piano. To see more on Chicago, go to .
Harriet I. Basseches, Ph.D., FIPA, outgoing chair of NAPsaC, is an IPA Board representative, member of the IPSO-IPA Relations Committee, member of the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, training and supervising analyst in the New York Freudian Society, and in private practice, Washington, DC.
To book online go to
Main location: The Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. To see the congress venue, go to .
NAPsaC will keep you posted on any late developments and announcements. We hope to see you in Chicago at the wonderful IPA Congress.