Psychoanalysis and Government: Why the FIPA Credential Is Important for You

To most of our members, the role and relevance of the IPA seems vague and undefined. Particularly at dues-paying time, we often hear the refrain, “What does the IPA do for us?” In fact, the IPA does a great deal that is indirectly important to us, such as representing psychoanalysis in Europe, Latin America, and in other developing regions. Perhaps most importantly, the IPA sets minimal international standards for psychoanalytic education. In our case, these responsibilities are carried out by our own Association in cooperation with the IPA.

In many cases, the IPA does help us more directly. There is no better example of that than how it worked with us to establish the FIPA credential for North America.

The Fellow of the IPA credential, or FIPA, was established by the IPA in 2004, following its development in a succession of CIPS, APsaA, and North American Psychoanalytic Confederation (NAPsaC) committees, to promote public awareness of the IPA while enabling IPA analysts to identify themselves to the public through the use of a special designation: the letters “F.I.P.A.” after their names. It was noted that the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychotherapy, and the American College of Psychoanalysis have such fellowship designations. In fact, most specialty societies offer a fellowship designation to their membership.

Birth of FIPA—Setting a Professional Standard

The immediate occasion for the FIPA was the passage of a New York state law creating a license for psychoanalysts. The law, promoted by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), was enacted in order to regulate otherwise unlicensed practitioners and featured minimal criteria for licensure. These criteria, based on NAAP educational standards, define licensure-eligible analytic training as comparable to “a master's degree in a mental health field” and include no frequency standards for training and control analysis. The New York law was the third such law passed in the United States, following passage of similar laws in Vermont and New Jersey.

Passage of the New York licensing law has resulted in the licensure of about 850 practitioners as “licensed psychoanalysts” or “LPs” and the accreditation of 15 licensure-eligible psychoanalytic institutes, including the Blanton-Peale Institute (established by Smiley Blanton and Norman Vincent Peale), the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy (providing license-eligible training in Gestalt psychoanalysis), and the C.G. Jung Institute, to name a few. A particular difficulty associated with the New York law has been that psychoanalysts licensed in traditional mental health professions cannot take the new license without sacrificing professional privileges (e.g., independent treatment of persons with severe disorders). If the law had been implemented without any action by the community of IPA analysts, it would have left the vast majority of IPA analysts with no widely recognizable credential in psychoanalysis, while the newly licensed practitioners, typically with far less training, would hold a very official state license in psychoanalysis!

Inheriting Trust

It was clear that the new law would create a confusion of identities, giving rise to two very different communities of psychoanalysts, leaving the public without a means to differentiate between them. A particular concern was that the newly licensed practitioners would inherit the reputation achieved by IPA-level analysts, and, moreover, be credited with the superior outcomes now being documented by our research.

Every committee that addressed this issue agreed that we needed to differentiate ourselves from the growing number of practitioners in New York and elsewhere, who utilize the professional designation “psychoanalyst” but do not represent our training or practice standards. In order to achieve this goal, we needed, as a start, a designation by which to identify ourselves. After considering many options, all our committees concluded that the IPA membership of North America, representing 4,000 members and an international standard for training, constituted an ideal community to share this new designation.

The IPA board, recognizing the challenges we face, voted to create the FIPA for North American members of the IPA, with an option for other regions to create a similar credential utilizing terminology appropriate to their own linguistic traditions. With the implementation of the FIPA by the IPA in 2004, responsibility for exploiting its potential fell to us, the IPA analysts of North America.

Marketing Our Practices and Profession

A growing number of our members are now utilizing the FIPA designation on business cards and other public representations, and some societies and institutes feature the FIPA on Web sites, bulletins, and in recruitment efforts. The FIPA is also publicized on the new NAPsaC “Find An Analyst” Web site () along with other information about psychoanalytic training and outcome research. This Web site, which markets all our practices, will soon be promoted through Google advertisements, courtesy of an IPA grant. While FIPA usage is increasing, we have still not reached a “tipping point” that moves everyone to use it. We are trying to reach this level and urge every one of our members to use this designation. Every individual who uses the FIPA is promoting not only himself but our whole profession.

While the FIPA is intended to promote professional representations of individual practitioners, the long-term objective of the FIPA project is collective not individual. Every profession must establish a unique identity in order to promote its social standing, including its credibility as a community of experts and the social value of its specialized expertise. This status is pivotal, not only to the marketing of professional services but to its efforts in promoting favorable social conditions for practice. Every profession devotes a measure of its capital, often a significant proportion of its treasury, to public policy initiatives.

APsaA has long been committed to a vigorous program of advocacy to protect and preserve professional privileges and patient rights, such as confidentiality, the privacy of patient health records, and the right to private practice. The Committee on Government Relations and Insurance (CGRI) is the expression of this commitment. The FIPA is a tool that will facilitate and strengthen these efforts on Capitol Hill and in the capitals of each state in which we pursue these efforts.

As this article goes to press, we are confronted with yet another licensing challenge, this time in Massachusetts, where a growing NAAP community is sponsoring legislation that would create licenses in “autonomous psychoanalysis” and “autonomous psychoanalytic psychotherapy,” again based on NAAP training standards, The passage of this legislation would further erode the meaning of the terms by which we define ourselves and our profession. A fuller and bolder utilization of the FIPA designation by IPA members in Massachusetts and elsewhere in North America will help us communicate our collective identity as founding stakeholders in the profession of psychoanalysis and thus strengthen our efforts to preserve psychoanalysis as a learned profession in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States.