On psychoanalytic journals and the International Forum of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Our society – the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) – started in 1962 and the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (IFP) began publication 30 years later, in 1992. Jan Stensson, in his first editorial message, reflected on the difficulties involved in the realization of a journal (Stensson, 1992). He recalled that psychoanalysis is rooted in the oral tradition but that the passage from the oral to the written is not impossible. Why then the need to found a journal? Psychoanalytic journals are an expression of the doctrinal positions of the association that founds them. They often begin with a justification, almost always of a political nature. The change from the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis was based above all on the strength of English-speaking institutions and not only on the predominance of the English language, as is the case today. There was also another justification of greater interest: to defend the purity of psychoanalysis. The struggles taking place within and outside the institution were transferred to the new journal. Erich Fromm – one of the founders of the IFPS – and Jacques Lacan are good examples of the exclusion of two authors who did not adapt to this doctrinal purity. The IFP is marked by the founding spirit of the IFPS. A spirit that did not imply a defense of doctrinal purity, but one of an openness which broke with the narrow assumptions that then characterized other psychoanalytic groups. Today it would be inconceivable for us to understand the expulsion of a member of our societies because of their theoretical orientation. And, if we talk about the rejection of an article in a journal, today it has to do not so much with the theoretical proposal it puts forward, but with a lack of expository clarity or other aspects that we could call formal. Some would say that we have gone from a doctrinal-based censorship to a formal-based censorship. It is impossible to deny censorship: authority has a thousand faces. Dante Alighieri, in his Divine Comedy, tells us through the mouth of one of his characters that “men are not made to live like animals but to seek knowledge and virtue” (Alighieri, 2005). This search for knowledge concerns us all and certainly those professionals, like us, who dedicate our efforts to delving into what escapes the conscience of others, what determines their behavior and decisions, what is beyond their reason. Every analyst is a researcher in the most literal sense of the term. Each therapeutic encounter provides us with a possibility of surprise and with it a knowledge that allows the patient a fuller life and us a greater closeness to the unknown. Our work carries with it a responsibility: to disseminate what we have learned, to offer others the possibility of comparing their experiences with ours, and to contrast their doubts and certainties. This dissemination basically involves the presentation of our experience at scientific meetings and through publications. Journals are the ideal places to communicate our thinking, our findings, to colleagues. They allow detailed and extensive reflection and, together with other publications, build a repository of knowledge that makes study, debate, and learning possible. A theoretical physicist of great prestige recently pointed out that very few will make seminal contributions that will lead to breakthroughs in their discipline (Greene, 2021). That remains for a select few who come up with radical findings that modify established paradigms (Kuhn, 2012). But many of us can aspire to “participate in the conversation” and contribute our thinking to a general debate, an exchange