(prepared by Lewis Kirshner on behalf of the North American Representatives to the IPA Board)
Many members in North America have expressed interest in the IPA's development programs in countries around the world. We asked Maria Teresa Hooke, the chair of the the International New Groups Committee (ING), and Madeleine Bachner from the China Committee to summarize their current activities.
Today the map of the IPA stretches beyond the areas in which psychoanalysis was born and developed. Many North American members have expressed interest in the IPA's support of new programs in countries around the world.
The International New Groups (ING) Committee, chaired by Maria Teresa Hooke, responds to and fosters new psychoanalytic groups in many countries. Members of the committee are appointed by the IPA president in consultation with the board and the committee chair. The chair reports to the board at each meeting and informs the president and Executive Committee of important developments between meetings. ING material is available through the IPA website at ipa.world.
We now are witnessing a “second wave” of expansion that followed the political and social changes after the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the former USSR, and the opening of China to the West after 1978. Globalization, the growing presence of psychoanalytic thinking, the diffusion of psychological therapies, and major cultural shifts have fostered a climate in which numerous new groups have formed.
Currently, the ING works with 20 study groups and 6 provisional societies that currently train 450 candidates. Countries with Study Groups include: Bulgaria, Estonia-Latvia, Lithuania, Lebanon, Russia,
Portugal, South Africa, Turkey, Paraguay, Brazil (five groups), Mexico (two groups) and Panama. In North America, Vermont and in Asia, South Korea and Taiwan. Provisional Societies have been established in Russia, Rumania, Turkey, Croatia, Serbia and France. In addition, there are two IPA training institutes: The Psychoanalytic Institute of Eastern Europe (PIEE), now called the European Psychoanalytic Institute (EPI), the Latin American Institute of Psychoanalysis (ILAP) and the China Committee which is also part of the wider umbrella of the ING. We work with four Allied Centres: in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Tunisia.
An earlier version of the paper by Maria Teresa Hooke was published on the first issue of the IPA EJournal.
The ongoing work with these nascent psychoanalytic entities involves enormous time, energy, expense and the participation of many members.
The IPA China Development Committee was formed in 2007 with the appointment of Peter Loewenberg by President Claudio Eizirik. Loewenberg and Paolo Fonda of Trieste, head of the PIEE, undertook an intensive site visit to Shanghai and Beijing in May 2007 and issued an extensive report with a plan to implement IPA activity in China. Connections were made with different universities and psychiatric hospitals in Beijing, where the first psychoanalytical training began in 2008, when a group of 10 candidates was selected to take seminars. The teachers came partly from the Sino-Norwegian psychotherapy program, a program started by the current chair of the China Committee, Sverre Varvin, in 2006. Other teachers like Alf Gerlach came from the Sino-German training program in Shanghai. The candidates had the fortunate opportunity of an established training analyst in Beijing. She stayed there for four years doing “in person analysis” and, afterwards, shuttled to Beijing twice a year (and continues to do so).
In 2011 the second psychoanalytic training started with a group of 10 candidates in Shanghai in cooperation with the Shanghai Mental Health Center. All the candidates, except one, are psychiatrists working in the Mental Health Center, and the training analyst who worked with them also had a connection to the Center. This group had the possibility of having in-person psychoanalysis with a training analyst who stayed eight months every year in China. One candidate has shuttled to the U.S. for 100 sessions a year over several years.
A third training group spanning several cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, is now being planned. We have several applicants and admission interviews are under way. The seminars will be conducted both by e-learning and in person, with teachers coming two to three times a year. What is different and important this time is that the Training Committee will involve Chinese direct members who will be assistant teachers during seminars. The biggest challenge for the new training is access to training analysis and the possibility to have as much in-person analysis as possible. The China Committee is working with this issue together with ING trying to find solutions within the guidelines of IPA training.
The IPA now welcomes five direct members in China and we hope gradually to move them toward applying for “study group” status. This will be the first step in establishing a society and a training institute in which the Chinese analysts can gradually take over the functions of the committee, including the training of new candidates. In addition, the Outreach Committee, a subcommittee of the China Committee, has been very active in initiating programs for professionals in the mental health area. They have organized seminars on infant observation, attachment research and mentalization.
The work in the China Committee is demanding, stimulating and sometimes difficult. Members are Western psychoanalysts trying to transmit their view of psychoanalysis into a country and culture that is very different from our own, but, of course, there is much common ground as we are all human beings with desire and curiosity to understand the human mind.
There is a persistent misconception among members and the public that the IPA and the ING go into new areas like a colonial power. The reality is different; when the ING is asked for help, it responds to the call. The request is inevitably complex, a mixture of need for help, hopefulness at the dawning of individual rights and personal freedom, a quest for identity, desire to better understand the human mind, and the possibility of relieving personal suffering. New groups begin in a variety of ways, each holding significant consequences for future development, yet ING has found common patterns. Often, pioneers who trained in another country
bring back a passion to introduce psychoanalysis in their own country. In other countries, where a long-standing psychoanalytic tradition has been crushed by repressive regimes, we see its resurgence under improved political conditions. Some groups wish to move away from large societies to develop training in their own cities and to form a separate identity; others have split from an existing society for ethical reasons or unsolvable conflicts.
When a group contacts the ING, a small committee is appointed to assess the possibilities of development and then to follow its growth. These sponsors travel twice a year to distant places and different continents with a complex and delicate task: to facilitate, educate, mediate and guide. They work with the new group for five or six years helping to build the basics of a future psychoanalytical society—its organizational structure, training, scientific life and outreach activities.
The encounter between the two cultures, the local culture and the IPA culture transmitted by the sponsors, is an emotionally charged encounter. The local group brings desire, expectations, curiosity, hope, need and apprehension, while the sponsors carry a commitment to psychoanalysis and its transmission. The emotions of the group can inspire the sponsors to relive the enthusiasm and wish to learn of their own first encounters with psychoanalysis. Strong bonds develop and, at times, emotional storms, perhaps necessary and unavoidable engines of these projects. The participants live through a process that changes both parties. ING does not come to bring a closed and dogmatic application of psychoanalysis. More than a matter of introducing Freud and our great thinkers, it aims to encourage a way of thinking analytically, a sharing of the humanizing potential of psychoanalysis and of its universal values, and of its critical and secular thinking.
The transmission of the culture and of the institutional experience of the IPA and its democratic system of governance also plays a large part. Inevitably, the encounter works both ways. Under the impact of different cultures, histories, and social and educational practices, the sponsors must rethink fundamental psychoanalytic tenets many are accustomed to take for granted. The tension between the two cultures is always there, as a creative or destructive force depending on the group's dynamics and the sponsors’ capacity to maintain a constructive and containing perspective in an emotionally charged atmosphere.
The process involves what Javier Garcia calls “disrobing,” which refers to our capacity in entering new territories to “disassemble” modes of functioning enshrined in our institutions of origin in order to be open to what is “psychoanalytically creative and different.” Experience teaches us something obvious; the beginnings in every group are crucial for its future development. In many regions where psychoanalysis is developing during this second wave, countries have suffered massive historical and social trauma. Sponsors learn the repercussions of history on the groups, including transgenerational transmission of traumas, historical legacies, persistent ethical issues, conflicts between generations and power struggles. It follows that the attention of the sponsors and of the ING to group dynamics has become an essential part of the work with new groups.
Paolo Fonda has the view that the crumbling of totalitarian regimes, which are repressive but also protective, creates new vulnerabilities and raises deep survival anxieties in individuals now seeking containment and help. Fonda connects this with the huge development of psychotherapies in the past 10 years. In his view, the societal changes open up a space for personal individuation and for psychoanalysis. We are looking at a new phenomenon: the individual emerging from a group that enveloped him and who is now left exposed. Something similar may be occurring in China, where disorienting and sudden socioeconomic changes and a materialist ethos threaten the traditional Confucian philosophy of family cohesion, harmony, duties and obligations. On the other hand, ideologies and political systems can continue to influence groups forming in countries with recent histories of political violence and totalitarian governance. ING has observed these patterns repeated in the life of the group.
Today the ING operates in a much more complex and delicate environment. In some countries, the sociopolitical context remains unstable, unpredictable, possibly dangerous, and the implications for our groups and our sponsors are not always easy to evaluate. We also face the fact that nowadays there are very few truly new areas. The local scene into which the ING enters is usually heavily saturated with psychotherapy organizations and psychoanalytic programs, some well qualified others less so, at times in competition with the IPA. The way ING approaches the scene, our attitude, and how we move among the intertwined network of relationships, is extremely important and affects the development of new groups and
future IPA societies. What Freud recommended in 1914 in his Papers on Technique and what Bion echoed in his paper Notes on Memory and Desire continue to be useful today. In our encounters with patients in the consulting room and with other cultures, we strive for an open, receptive state of mind, free of expectations, inclinations or judgment. Both Freud and Bion recommended the analyst remain open to the unknown, but both also understood that the dread of the unknown is common to the human experience, common to both analyst and patient, and also in the encounter with another culture. An open mind on our part implies the capacity of psychoanalysis to reflect on the universality of its basic assumptions and on the possibility that these could find a home in very different cultural contexts.
Editor's Note:
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