The bi-annual meetings of the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) and North American psychoanalysts were conceived and initiated by Homer Cur tis and Donald Meyers nearly 20 years ago. They developed a plan for a two-and-a-half-day meeting wherein small groups of six or seven European and North American analysts would each present detailed process notes from one week of analytic work to allow the participants to develop a deeper and clinically based understanding of the similarities and differences amongst their various approaches. To achieve this aim, it seemed to the organizers that it would be helpful to have only highly experienced psychoanalysts (to insure that the sessions would not deteriorate into supervision), and so, accordingly, the conference was initially limited to training analysts. In addition, since the meetings were intended to be small, easily organized, and manageable in terms of hotel, travel, and size of groups, the total number of attendees was fixed at around 80. Consequently, on the North American side, participation was decided to be by invitation only.
The organizational concerns were a bit different from the EPF side due to the fact that there were (and continue to be) marked dissimilarities amongst their component institutes with respect to the training analyst designation; for example, France limits that designation only to supervisory work and does not require the analysis of candidates to be conducted by training analysts, whereas other European countries have a training analyst model more closely akin to ours. Additionally, there was some unease about organizing a conference that was “by invitation only” due to the complexities inherent in the relationship between the EPF and the various component institutes in the different countries. As a result, in the earlier years of the meetings, there was greater variance in the levels of experience from the European contingency. Over the last few years, thanks to the efforts of the EPF, this disparity has been remedied, allowing for very interesting and fruitful meetings, conducive to a fuller appreciation of different clinical approaches as well as to the formation of collegial bonds.
The meetings were scheduled to fall in the years between the meetings of the IPA, and the first meeting was held in Denmark in 1990, with the second in Ireland in 1992. I was asked to join Curtis and Meyers as part of the organizing group for the third meeting in Nice, although the lion's share of the work was done by Meyers. Sometime during these first years, they decided to forge a relationship between this conference and the North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC), with officers of NAPsaC working alongside the original organizing group and participating in decisions regarding place, cost, selection of invitees, activities around the actual meetings, and other details.
The EPF has increasingly taken the lead in the choice of location and determination of cost, though always through mutual agreement with the North American side. A prime determining factor for the selection of the conference venue has been the presence of an analyst in that location who is willing to take on the often onerous and sometimes thankless task of finding a hotel, negotiating rates, and arranging various activities. After the two initial meetings, there have been conferences in Glasgow, Santa Margherita Ligure, Camoglie, Lugano, Tubingen, and Semmering, with the latest taking place in Amsterdam last summer. Despite the considerable time and energy the conference
Edward Nersessian, M.D., is training and supervising psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, and clinical professor of psychiatry, Cornell-Weill Medical College.
organization requires, someone has always come forward to volunteer, which is no doubt a reflection of the value participants have come to place on the meetings. At the close of the Amsterdam meeting, Maria Teresa Flores from Lisbon volunteered and proposed Portugal as the host country; she subsequently selected the costal resort town of Cascais as the next location of the conference.
The timing of the meetings is another issue that has sometimes surfaced. From the outset, it has been our preference to have the meetings towards the end of July, so that they correspond to the beginning of the summer break for most North Americans. Europeans, on the other hand, have different vacation times; some have their summer break in June, some in July, some in August, and some as late as September. So far, we have been able to work around this problem, though it does sometimes mean less representation from one or the other of the European countries. Over the last couple of meetings, we have also had analysts from Japan and Australia joining us, and there is a suggestion on the table to invite a few analysts from Central and South America for the next meeting, though again, the issue of summer break may present a problem.
Finally, in the past few years, we have decided not to limit the conference to training analysts, but to experienced analysts, that is to say, analysts who have been seeing patients in analysis for some years.
Beginning with the meeting in Amsterdam, I took over the responsibility of inviting the North American contingency from Don Meyers and, along with Harriet Basseches from NAPsaC, worked with the EPF (represented by Gerda Frijda, Peter Wegner, and Jonathan Sklar) to organize the conference. Beginning with the meeting in 2010, it was decided in discussion with Prudence Gourguechon and Robert Pyles (NAPsaC co-chairs) to ask those wanting to participate in the conference to send letters of interest to the secretary of NAPsaC, which would then be forwarded to me. This new system would permit the conference to be open to all, bearing in mind that we are limited to about 40 participants from North America. Given the popularity of this conference and the unanimously positive feedback we receive from the participants, it is important that those interested contact Rick Perlman at or 212-505-7751 expeditiously. As mentioned above, the next conference will be in Cascais, just outside Lisbon, on the coast of Portugal, at the Hotel Cascais Miragem. It is scheduled for July 22-25, 2010.