International Psychoanalytical Association


The International Psychoanalytical Association is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, on an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi.

History

In 1902 Sigmund Freud started to meet every week with colleagues to discuss his work, and so the Psychological Wednesday Society was born. By 1908 there were 14 regular members and some guests including Max Eitingon, Carl Jung, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones, all future Presidents of the IPA. Society became the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.
In 1907 Jones suggested to Jung that an international meeting should be arranged. Freud welcomed the proposal. The meeting took place in Salzburg on April 27, 1908. Jung named it the "First Congress for Freudian Psychology". It is later reckoned to be the first International Psychoanalytical Congress. Even so, the IPA had not yet been founded.
The IPA was established at the next Congress held at Nuremberg in March 1910. Its first President was Carl Jung, and its first Secretary was Otto Rank. Sigmund Freud considered an international organization to be essential to advance his ideas. In 1914 Freud published a paper entitled.
The IPA is the world’s primary accrediting and regulatory body for psychoanalysis. The IPA's aims include creating new psychoanalytic groups, stimulating debate, conducting research, developing training policies and establishing links with other bodies. It organizes a large biennial Congress.

Regional organizations

There is a Regional Organisation for each of the IPA’s 3 regions:
Each of these three bodies consists of Constituent Organisations and Study Groups that are part of that IPA region. The IPA has a close working relationship with each of these independent organisations and values them highly, but they are not officially or legally part of the IPA.

Constituent organizations

The IPA's members qualify for membership by being a member of a "constituent organisation".
Constituent Organisations
"Study Groups" are bodies of analysts which have not yet developed sufficiently to be a freestanding society, but that is their aim.
"Allied Centres" are groups of people with an interest in psychoanalysis, in places where there are not already societies or study groups.
The first 23 Congresses of IPA did not have a specific theme.

Criticism

In 1975, Erich Fromm questioned this organization and found that the psychoanalytic association was "organized according to standards rather dictatorial".
In 1999, Elisabeth Roudinesco noted that IPA professionalizing psychoanalysis had become "a machine to manufacture significant". She also said that in France, "Lacanian colleagues looked IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism".
She wrote of the "IPA Legitimist Freudianism, we mistakenly called "orthodox" ". Among Roudinesco's other criticisms, she wrote about "homophobia" in the IPA, considered as a "disgrace of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, most criticisms against IPA tend to stick to Lacan's point of view from the 1950s, unaware of most of the developments, variety of schools and training models within this association in the last decades. One of the three training models in the IPA, is mostly due to Lacan's ideas and their perspectives regarding the training.