2. The Crisis: Is it Psychoanalysis or the IPA:

Writing this post was a response to the IPA’s dealing with the crisis of the declining interest in psychoanalysis. The IPA offers solutions-like encouraging research-without looking for the causes of its fading relevance. I believe that the problem is with the psychoanalysis offered in the IPA’s training institutes. Increasing the membership to IPA-if it will ever happen- is not a measure or indication of gaining strength. The strength of psychoanalysis, which should be evident in the teachings and training in the IPA's institutes, is the measure of its usefulness as an international association. Better, instead of making psychoanalysis more appealing try making it more convincing as a science and a practice.

Resorting to some arguable measures of training to make psychoanalysis appeal to more candidates, as is the trend in some psychoanalytic circles will harm psychoanalysis more, or at least-will change its particular quality as a specific psychotherapy. This trend is responsible for allowing the improvisation of schools of psychoanalysis and for some analysts to revise basics analytic premises without enough scrutinization. The point to make is that if we-psychoanalysts- are members of an International organization- we should have a system to allow and disallow certain changes to psychoanalysis. Even though it is healthy that analysts consider making changes to psychoanalysis to advance it, the current changes to psychoanalysis do not have any convincing evidence that they are done to improve psychoanalysis or take it a step forward in its natural course of evolution. The IPA is supposed to be the insitution that should organize and provide an international agreed-upon standard from of uncontrollable changes to psychoanalysis. It is not right that under the provisions of the IPA there is learning and training in some societies and institutes of theories that contradict-openly and blatantly- the basic premises of “traditional” psychoanalysis.

The present situation in psychoanalysis reflects a state of chaos that has already made the future of psychanalysis untenable.  Firstly, we have a gap between psychoanalysis on this side of the Atlantic and the other side.  Psychoanalysis is comfortably established there as an academic subject. The IPA institutes seems to all be still adhering to traditional psychoanalysis. There is no noticeable conflict between the two systems. On this side of the ocean we had a dozen “schools” of psychoanalysis since Kohut initiated self-analysis. The birth and death of those schools does not follow any comprehensible theoretical line. The basis of one of the present popular schools is founded on almost a psychoanalytic rumor that one cannot hid his- self.  Psychoanalysis is not a political issue where people are free to follow their own preferences or their choices: we are professionals who provide an identified health service to people (and get paid for it), therefore we have to either agree on what we do or do not claim that we are all the same.

The IPA assumed and still presumably act as an international professional body of psychoanalysts who work to promote the right kind of psychoanalysis.  We have no idea of what is happening in the different, diverse, and theoretically confusing conditions of learning and training in the IPA institutes. It is understandable that monitoring training is left to the regional and local societies. However, maintaining the hundred years notion of the function of the IPA is misleading, and causing unnecessary distraction from the solution: If you cannot do it let that who could do it instead.

My argument is with analysts who should dispel the myth of the IPA, but do not want to lose the sense of distinction that comes with it. 
I should give up hope to convince the 12,000 analysts that they are better off with strong university programs adopting psychoanalysis. But, as a Chinese proverb says: not the last blow that splits the rock, all the blows that precede make that possible.