4. An Unhealthy Symbiosis

The crisis of psychoanalysis is intriguing: the IPA was the incubator that protected and strengthened psychoanalysis to survive, but it is now-inadvertently- causing its gradual demise. The reason for changing form the protector to the danger that threatens it is the analysts’ refusal to acknowledge that its function in Freud’s time is not what is expected of it now. 

Jones (1955, p 74), commenting on the early success of psychoanalysis said that it came with ‘sinister signs of growing tension between the adherents’, which made Freud think that the remedy is a wider organization not local societies that would eventually form an international organization. The IPA was then born. Although this move proved to work at that time, it left an indelible mark on the psychoanalytic organizations: growing from the top to bottom (the secret committee, the training analyst status, the centers of power in the local societies). Thus, a symbiotic link between psychoanalysis and its organization was established and with it something wrong happened without any attention paid to: instead of psychoanalysis giving the organization the justification to exist, the organization became the official authority and official representation of psychoanalysis. This reversed dependency affected psychoanalysis negatively. Psychoanalysis is knowledge that is living, evolving, and advancing while the organization is supposed follow that advancement and change to keep serving it. Instead, the organization of psychoanalysis has become the authority that decides all the issues of the community of psychoanalysts: training and practice, what is acceptable deviations from the standard the Freudian theory, accreditation of and certification. The result was changing the organization-IPA- from a membership organization of professionals into an educational training organization and licencing body of professionals.

The link between education (learning and training) and membership was beneficial at the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. It contained the disruptive trends and even the individuals whose personal idiosyncrasies could have ended the movement early. It also adopted the developing and expanding theoretical aspects and improvised a system of to oversee learning and training. However, there should have been some awareness that the symbiotic relationship between the membership aspect and the educational aspect that were entwined in the structure of the IPA has to end when psychoanalysis reaches a level of stability and strength that allow each aspect to endure on its own. Maybe this was too much to expect early in the history of psychoanalysis when people were busy building to expect them to think of changes of that nature. Yet, it was obvious as early at that time that the entwined functions of education and membership was creating  damaging and unsustainable conditions within the movement. The continuation of the “sinister signs of tension between the members” proved that the symbiosis between analysis and its institution was detrimental.  It actually got worse; the tension between individual analysts- as was the case before the creation of the IPA- became wars between camps of leading figures in the movement.

Separating education from membership could have kept psychoanalysis, as the evolving knowledge, away from the political, hierarchical, personal and status revelries, and made membership an expression of devotion to the profession. That separation should have been regarded the wise thing to do at a future point, since it was too early to think of it before Freud’s passing. Now when we have the history of the movement spread in front of us, we ask: at what point this separation should have taken place? A reasonable point was at the time of the conflicts in Great Britain between the Kleinian and the A. Freudians (the controversies), and in France at the time of the splits of Nacht\ Lagacht then Lagacht\ Lacan. My vague and limited knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis in the US, before the late sixties, makes me think that the environment at the Menninger’s clinic could have made that separation successfully happen with less pain; if it was not for the dominance of the psychiatrists at the scene, who were also academics. At those points in the history of psychoanalysis the separation would have solved several problems then, and many of our current problems.

Those three points in the history of psychoanalysis are significantly indicative of what happens to demand change. They were points that came when psychoanalysis was turning the corner from a simplistic understanding of  Freud’s functional theorizing of the psyche to a more structural attitude toward more advanced psychoanalysis and newer understanding of the blind spots in Freud's theory.  Kleinian psychoanalysis was moving towards exploring the processes that structure the infant’s intrapsychic core, instead of the psychologies of defence mechanisms and adaptation which were simplistic expansion of ego psychology.  As I will discuss in the next section of this posting, analysts ‘revolted’ (sometimes unsuccessfully) against functional analytic theories because their analytic insights went further and beyond the last of Freud's insights. Psychoanalysis was evolving and gaining new perspective of the human subject. Missing this feature made the IPA miss the chance to understand the nature of the changes in psychoanalysis and the chance to change accordingly. For us now, we should look back on the lost chances to know what we could do  to save psychoanalysis from the decaying IPA. The IPA’s function is no longer the same of Freud’s IPA.  

In the next part of this posting I will concentrate on the changes in psychoanalysis that occurred and were not given the proper attention to consider making the appropriate changes in the functions of the IPA, particularly in the leaning and training in psychoanalysis.