30 years with the International Forum of Psychoanalysis

I (M.C.) am writing this Editorial together with Grigoris Maniadakis, who has been working with me since the fall of 2014, once he became the successor of Christer Sjödin, with whom I had worked as a Coeditor-in-Chief of this journal since June 2007. In fact, Christer had edited the International Forum of Psychoanalysis alone between 2004 and 2007, having worked together with our founding editor, Jan Stensson, from 1999 to 2004. Before that, from 1992 to 1999, Jan Stennson had been the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. In other words, there have been only four people in these roles in the first 30 years of the journal’s existence, with Christer, myself, and Grigoris continuing to work according to the very good model and working routine established by Jan – a description of this can be found in his interview with Christer Sjödin in 2006. Originally published by the Scandinavian University Press, since 2000 IFP has been published by Taylor & Francis, which has provided an important contribution to its promotion and its online circulation. The same is true for the PEP-web, where readers can find all our work and all 30 volumes that we have produced.

The words “30 years with the International Forum of Psychoanalysis” relate to the fact that I was there at the time the journal was born, that is, during the VIth International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) Scientific Conference, which took place in Stockholm in August 1991, having the conference been organized by Jan Stensson, together with his society, the Swedish Society for Holistic Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy – later renamed the Swedish Psychoanalytic Association. It was at this conference that the Executive Committee of the IFPS gave the final approval to the project of the journal, which had also been initiated by Jochen Kemper and Michael Ermann, who in 1985 had contributed to the founding of the German journal Forum der Psychoanalyse.

August is the perfect time for being in Stockholm, and the conference took place at the Grand Hotel; most of the time the very amiable and constructive climate of the meeting accompanied our work. The fact that it was in Stockholm that I won the Joseph Barnett Candidate Award, with my paper having been published in the very first issue of IFP (see Conci, 1992), is another reason why I feel I have been so close to the journal from the very beginning. At the Florence Forum of 1994, Jan Stensson invited me to join the journal as an assistant editor, and I have kept working for and with it ever since. With this timeline it is no wonder that I have read and contributed to producing almost all of the 30 volumes that we are celebrating through this monographic issue.

I (G.M.) joined in the editorial work first as an editorial reader and then, from 2012, as an associate editor, with Christer and Marco as Coeditors-in-Chief. The directness and integrative quality of the exchanges at Board meetings have been pivotal to my experience. I soon realized that this was the ethos of IFP, which I have been able to contribute to as a Coeditor-in-Chief since 2014, after Christer stepped down.

But let us now come to the present issue. Grigoris and I thought that a very good way of celebrating the 30 years of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis would be to invite a whole series of colleagues to celebrate the anniversary with us by writing down their thoughts. The following colleagues were invited to do just this: Juan Flores (Santiago de Chile), secretary general of IFPS; Christer Sjödin (Stockholm); Michael Ermann (Berlin), former member of the Executive Committee of the IFPS and former regional editor; Valerie Tate Angel (New York), member of the Executive Committee and regional editor; Miguel Angel Gonzalez Torres (Bilbao), member of the Executive Committee and regional editor, who wrote his comment with Romulo Aguillaume (Madrid), himself a regional editor of IFP; Klaus Hoffmann (Konstanz), member of the Executive Committee and regional editor; and Eliana Pereira Mendes (Belo Horizonte), former regional editor.

A second way of celebrating our anniversary has consisted in proposing to Andrea Huppke, the author of the first historical reconstruction of the first 25 years of the life of the IFPS, that a German American colleague of hers, Robin Verner, should translate the first chapter of her book, Global vernetzte Psychoanalyse. Die International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) zwischen 1960 and 1980 [A globally connected psychoanalysis. The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) between 1960 and 1980], into English. This chapter, with the title “The inception of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS),” centers around the post-war climate of international psychoanalysis at the end of the 1950s, and the events through which, on July 30, 1962 in Amsterdam, Werner Schwidder and Franz Heigl for the German Psychoanalytic Society, Erich Fromm and Jorge Silva Garcia for their Mexican group, and Igor Caruso and Raul Schindler for the Vienna Arbeitskreis signed the agreement that gave birth to the IFPS.

At the beginning of 2022 our Paris colleague Nicolas Gougoulis proposed to us the publication in our journal of the first interview to come out in France – conducted by him and his colleague Katryn Driffield – with the protagonist of contemporary psychoanalysis Thomas Ogden. This is a very good interview that we are sure that our readers will greatly enjoy. The dialogical exchange they develop is very similar to the one that Jan Stensson developed with us, his collaborators on the editorial board. The method he transmitted to us consisted in transforming our task of evaluating the papers we received in a big chance of professional and scientific growth, not only for us members of the board, but also for our authors (see also Conci, 2016).

Another new friend of the journal is Alberto Stefana, who sent us the paper “Where is psychoanalysis today? Sixty-two psychoanalysts share their subjective perspectives on the state of the art of psychoanalysis: A qualitative thematic analysis,” which he wrote with a series of colleagues (Barbara Celentani, Alexandar Dimitrijevic, Paolo Migone, and Cesare Albasi). The basis of this was the answers to a questionnaire on the state and future of psychoanalysis published in 2016 in the Italian journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, in connection with the 60 years of its life, since its foundation by Pier Francesco Galli in 1967. According to the authors, we will have to work very hard in order to promote the central role that psychoanalysis can still play in helping all of us live a better, healthier and more creative life.

Having given much thought to the matter, I decided to write not just a review, but a review essay of the abovementioned book by Andrea Huppke, to familiarize our readers with the origin and first phases of development of our Federation. The book has not yet come out in English, but we hope this can occur in time for our next Forum, which will take place in Madrid in October 2022.

Since 2010 the IFPS has covered the online subscription to IFP for all its members, and this innovative strategy has promoted an important identification of the Federation and its members with their journal. From this point of view the IFP has not only accomplished its task of helping the IFPS survive the identity crisis it went through at the beginning of the 1980 (see also Conci’s review of Huppke’s book), but also greatly contributed to the IFPS coming to a new international role and visibility. In fact, the journal has had more than 20,000 downloads of papers during 2019, 2020, and 2021, thus providing an important contribution to promote the international psychoanalytic dialogue that still remains the main objective of the IFPS.