15. Struggles Over Implementation, 1989-1990

The story of the struggle over “lay analysis” in America did not end with the 1989 IPA Congress in Rome, though the events of that Congress signaled the transformation of the struggle into the ongoing process of the full integration—as yet unfinished at the time of this writing —of nonmedical colleagues and aspirants in the United States within the organized institutional structures of the American and the IPA. Three important separable aspects of this process have emerged during this time period (1989-96) as the focus of ongoing activity and concern. One has been the continuing negotiations—often intense and at times acrimonious—between the IPA and the American on the one hand, and Cliff Stromberg and his colleagues, as the continuing attorneys for the former plaintiffs and their supporters, on the other hand. These concern the progression of the four independent psychoanalytic training groups identified in the preceding chapter (three of them voted into Provisional Society status in the IPA at the Rome Congress) toward the final acceptance of all four as full component societies in the IPA, plus additional site visits, either initiated or just planned, which have not yet led to any other than the first four groups being admitted to the IPA. The second has been the coalescence of these four new IPA Societies into what was first called the Coalition of Independent IPA Societies, and was then renamed the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (CIPS) in the United States, and the subsequent grouping of this organization (CIPS), together with the American and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (CPS) into a loose coalition, the North American IPA Groups (NAIPAG). The latter joined forces around common concerns, including their participation in IPA affairs, and especially their joint involvement in fashioning the North American representation in the IPA's new House of Delegates, an organization designed to accord the component Societies a