The International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, from an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi.
In 1902 Sigmund Freud started to meet every week with colleagues to discuss his work, thus establishing the Psychological Wednesday Society. 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. The 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 international accrediting and regulatory body for member organisations. The IPA's aims include creating new psychoanalytic groups, conducting research, developing training policies and establishing links with other bodies. It organizes a biennial Congress.
There is a Regional Organisation for each of the IPA's three 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, but they are not officially or legally part of the IPA.
The IPA's members qualify for membership by being a member of a "constituent organisation" (or the sole regional association).
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.
In 1975, Erich Fromm questioned this organization and found that the psychoanalytic association was "organized according to standards rather dictatorial".
In 1999, ÃÂlisabeth Roudinesco noted that the IPA's attempts to professionalize psychoanalysis had become "a machine to manufacture significance". She also said that in France, "Lacanian colleagues looked upon the IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism". She wrote of the "IPA['s] Legitimist Freudianism, as mistakenly called "orthodox"".
On the other hand, most criticisms laid against the IPA tend to come from a 1950s Lacanian point of view, unaware of recent developments, and of the variety of schools and training models within the association in recent decades. One of the three training models in the IPA (the French Model), is mostly due to Lacan's ideas and their perspectives regarding the training.
Among Roudinesco's other criticisms was her reference to "homophobia" in the IPA, considered a "disgrace of psychoanalysis.
According to psychiatrist Albert Le Dorze, the association is homophobic.
The archive of the International Psychoanalytical Association is held at Wellcome Collection (ref no: SA/IPA).