Letter from Basle

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Notes

1. Today, the independent PSZ has around 450 participants. It is organized by democratic self‐determination. The assembly of the participants represents the administrative body that decides all major concerns. It elects the head of the seminar as an executive body. The PSZ “follows the theory and practice of Freudian psychoanalysis&and picks up on a critical tendency with regard to institutions within the psychoanalytic movement in Switzerland.” (Declaration of intent, by the assembly of participants, 12.2.1982). It is concerned with a “continual confrontation with the theoretical concepts, the respectively emerging organizational forms in the seminar and the political and cultural conditions under which psychoanalytic thought and work is taking place.” Psychoanalysis should be taught and experienced in its conflictual and contradictory potential. Thus, the confrontation of psychoanalysis at the PSZ is not just focussed on clinical issues, but also on its relationship with cultural and socio‐political questions. The decision to declare oneself a psychoanalyst is part of this process (Wikipedia.de; portrait PSZ).