Brussels – EPF 60th Anniversary Symposium
2–3 October 2026
When I was invited to participate in the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the European Psychoanalytical Federation, I immediately accepted with great enthusiasm. It soon became clear, however, that I could not simply revisit what I had already written about my experience within the Federation and the transformations it had undergone. I needed to find another way of returning to this history.
My first attempt to reflect on this experience came at the Federation's 30th anniversary, when I was serving as its President. At that time, I proposed several orientations for its future development. These concerned less a reform of its structures than a particular conception of its mission : to foster a genuine European scientific community capable of bringing different psychoanalytic traditions into dialogue during a period of profound transformation across the continent (Gibeault, 1997).
Twenty years later, on the occasion of the Federation's 50th anniversary, I adopted a different perspective. I looked back on the major transformations that had marked the 1990s: the remarkable expansion of the EPF's scientific activities, its opening towards the countries of Central and Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the evolution of its relationship with the International Psychoanalytical Association, the debates surrounding psychoanalytic training, and the emergence of new forms of institutional organisation (Gibeault, 2016). Each of these texts belonged to a particular moment in the Federation's history and represented a first attempt to elaborate the experience that had been gained.
Ten years later, it no longer seemed appropriate simply to offer another historical account. The events themselves are well known; many have already been described by those who experienced them, and some of their principal protagonists are sadly no longer with us. The passage of time now invites a different kind of reflection. The question is no longer simply to revisit this history, but to ask what it can teach us about the life of a psychoanalytic institution and about the conditions that enable it to remain a living community of inquiry.
How can a psychoanalytic institution preserve a shared space for thinking when so many forces tend to promote divisions, group identifications, and institutional polarisation? Today, this question seems to me even more fundamental than that of leadership itself.
The title of our panel brings together two notions—democracy and leadership. Both naturally belong to the vocabulary of political science and management. They evoke representation, governance, decision-making procedures, and the exercise of authority. Yet my experience within the European Psychoanalytical Federation gradually led me to rethink these categories in order to understand more fully the life of a psychoanalytic institution.
A psychoanalytic institution is not an organisation like any other. Its purpose is not simply to ensure its own functioning or to make decisions. Its fundamental task is to create the conditions that enable an analytic community to pursue a shared enterprise of inquiry grounded in clinical experience. Theoretical differences, national traditions, linguistic diversity, and divergent conceptions of psychoanalytic training are not accidental obstacles. They are the very expression of the plurality that characterises an international scientific community. The challenge, therefore, is not to eliminate these differences but to make their elaboration possible. Looking back, it seems to me that institutional responsibility consists less in exercising authority than in preserving the conditions under which such transformation can occur.
I. Transforming a Federation of Societies into a European Scientific Community
A federation of psychoanalytic societies does not, in itself, constitute a genuine scientific community. Such a community cannot emerge simply from the addition of national institutions, however prestigious they may be. It requires the invention of settings that enable psychoanalysts belonging to different theoretical traditions, languages, and cultures to think together on the basis of their clinical experience.
Looking back, this distinction now seems fundamental to me. The first major transformation that I had the privilege of witnessing within the European Psychoanalytical Federation concerned neither its statutes, nor its governance, nor even its scientific orientations. More discreetly, it concerned the very conditions under which an analytic community could gradually learn to think together.
When I first became involved in the Federation's activities in the early 1980s, the EPF was already a well-established institution. Its scientific vocation was clearly affirmed, and its principal activities—the Standing Conference on Training, the Bulletin, and the European Congresses—had already created lasting links between the European psychoanalytic societies. Yet, important as these activities undoubtedly were, they did not in themselves suffice to transform the Federation into a genuine scientific community.
During the years that followed, a deeper transformation gradually took place. It did not result from a spectacular institutional reform but from the creation of a series of new scientific settings: the Scientific Symposia, the Associate Members' Seminar—today the Newly Qualified Analysts' Seminar (NQAS)—meetings for training analysts, specialised conferences, and exchanges with North American societies. At the time, these initiatives might have appeared simply as a diversification of the Federation's activities. Today, I attribute a much deeper significance to them. They gradually transformed the very nature of the Federation. The aim was no longer merely to organise meetings between societies but to create the conditions under which psychoanalysts from different traditions could work together on their clinical practice. This distinction seems decisive to me: a scientific institution does not produce thought directly; rather, it creates the conditions in which thought can emerge.
I fully grasped the significance of this development only by participating myself in one of these new settings. When I first attended a meeting of the EPF Board in 1981, I was representing Raymond Cahn, then President of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society. Daniel Widlöcher was President of the Federation. I was still a young analyst, discovering the workings of an international institution whose history and underlying dynamics I had not yet begun to understand.
One detail nevertheless struck me. At that time, the Federation enjoyed relatively substantial financial resources. Many organisations would probably have used them to strengthen their administrative structures or to organise larger international events. The leaders of the Federation made a very different choice. They decided instead to invest primarily in creating new scientific settings that brought together small groups of psychoanalysts to work around clinical material or theoretical issues. I did not fully appreciate the importance of this decision until two years later. In 1983, I participated in the first Associate Members' Seminar of the European Psychoanalytical Federation, now known as the Newly Qualified Analysts' Seminar (NQAS). Its principle was remarkably simple. Each young analyst presented a clinical case within a small group led by an experienced training analyst, together with colleagues from many European societies.
I presented my clinical material in the group chaired by Pearl King, whose scientific authority and personal qualities were recognised far beyond the British Psychoanalytical Society. At the time, I naturally thought that I was taking part in a high-level clinical discussion. Gradually, however, I realised that something much more important was taking place. What emerged within that group was neither a formal teaching seminar, nor a classical supervision, nor a doctrinal debate between psychoanalytic schools. Rather, a different form of scientific work became possible.
The clinical case gradually ceased to belong exclusively to the analyst presenting it. Without losing its roots in the singular experience of that analyst, it became a shared object of reflection. Each participant could freely associate from his or her own clinical experience, formulate hypotheses, recognise the intuitions of others, and gradually modify his or her own understanding of the material. Within this setting, Pearl King did not primarily appear as the holder of superior knowledge. Her role was rather to sustain the conditions of a collective process of inquiry in which differences of experience, analytic culture, and theoretical background gradually became resources for shared thinking rather than obstacles to dialogue.
I then understood that this seminar produced much more than the transmission of knowledge. It created enduring scientific and personal relationships among young European psychoanalysts who would probably never otherwise have met in such a way. More importantly still, it enabled them to experience thinking together. It was there, I believe, that a genuine European scientific community truly began to take shape.
This experience did not remain unique. The same setting was progressively adopted in other scientific initiatives of the Federation, particularly in the meetings organised between European and North American psychoanalytic societies. Here again, the aim was not primarily to confront doctrines or defend the positions of particular traditions. The work centred on concrete clinical situations, sufficiently rich to enable psychoanalysts with very different backgrounds to elaborate hypotheses together without allowing theoretical divergences to become obstacles to dialogue.
Looking back, I believe that it was precisely this orientation that profoundly transformed the European Psychoanalytical Federation throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The real innovation did not lie in multiplying scientific activities. Many institutions are capable of organising congresses or conferences. The innovation lay in the nature of the settings themselves. They did not seek to produce doctrinal consensus. Rather, they created a framework within which the diversity of psychoanalytic traditions could become a condition for inquiry rather than a threat to identity.
A federation of societies may perfectly fulfil its administrative functions, represent its members, and organise scientific meetings without yet becoming a genuine community of thought. A scientific community comes into being when psychoanalysts discover that they can think with their differences rather than despite them. It was precisely this shift that the settings created by the Federation made possible.
Looking back today, I am struck by the fact that these settings already contained the essential characteristics that I would later recognise in the other institutional experiences discussed in this paper. They never sought to reduce theoretical, linguistic, or cultural differences. On the contrary, they acknowledged them as constitutive elements of European scientific life while placing them within a framework where they could be worked through rather than defended.
In other words, the transformation did not primarily concern individuals or their convictions. It concerned the very conditions of their encounter. Psychoanalysts belonging to sometimes distant traditions naturally continued to think from within their own conceptual frameworks. Yet the setting introduced a new form of mediation between them. The clinical case gradually became a shared object of reflection. The issue was no longer to oppose schools or concepts but to elaborate together a clinical experience that resisted any single interpretation. It is here, I believe, that the notion of transformation acquires its full meaning. The transformation did not concern the theories themselves. It concerned the process through which those theories could enter into dialogue without losing their singularity.
Today, I believe that this evolution rested upon a genuine process of symbolization made possible by the setting itself. The setting introduced a mediating space between the participants. Narcissistic investments attached to institutional or theoretical affiliations gradually became less defensive because they found a new object of investment in the shared work of inquiry. What mattered was not simply the presence of several interlocutors, but the emergence of a shared psychic space in which each participant could associate freely, recognise the contributions of others, and gradually modify his or her own understanding of the clinical material.
For many years, I thought that the principal function of a scientific institution was to organise exchanges, disseminate knowledge, or represent a professional community. Today, I would formulate it differently. The primary responsibility of a psychoanalytic institution is not to produce thought directly but to invent the settings through which thought can emerge. Institutions do not think; people do. Yet institutions can create—or, conversely, prevent—the conditions under which shared thinking becomes possible.
For this reason, I would now define institutional innovation more precisely than I would have done in the past. It is not primarily the creation of a new structure or the adoption of a new rule. Rather, it consists in inventing a setting capable of transforming the encounter between people, traditions, and experiences into a genuine process of elaboration. From this perspective, institutional innovation is first and foremost the invention of a collective setting that makes shared psychic elaboration possible.
II. Inventing the Conditions for Transmission in an Exceptional Historical Situation
Among the various institutional experiences I had within the European Psychoanalytical Federation, none probably transformed my understanding of international responsibilities more profoundly than the opening towards the countries of Central and Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At first sight, the situation appeared relatively straightforward. After several decades during which psychoanalysis had been prohibited, marginalised, or forced into clandestine existence in a number of countries, many psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists expressed a strong desire to undertake psychoanalytic training. Their enthusiasm was remarkable. It testified to a genuine wish to reconnect with an intellectual and clinical tradition from which they had been cut off for several generations.
Behind this enthusiasm, however, a much deeper difficulty immediately emerged. The very conditions that normally make psychoanalytic training possible simply did not exist. It was not only that there were no societies recognised by the International Psychoanalytical Association. There was also a lack of training analysts, opportunities for supervision, organised teaching structures, and, in several countries, even the possibility of undertaking a personal analysis.
We were therefore confronted with a genuine paradox. For the first time, colleagues were expressing an exceptionally strong desire to become psychoanalysts precisely when the ordinary conditions required for psychoanalytic training were absent. We soon realised that this contradiction could not be resolved simply by applying existing regulations.
If we insisted that all the usual requirements had to be fulfilled before training could begin, we would effectively condemn these colleagues to remain excluded from the international psychoanalytic community for many years. Yet if we abandoned those requirements in the name of exceptional historical circumstances, we risked weakening the very foundations of psychoanalytic transmission. The challenge was therefore not to choose between rigour and openness. It was to remain faithful to the fundamental principles of psychoanalytic training while inventing the institutional settings that this unprecedented historical situation required.
This experience taught me a first fundamental lesson: a psychoanalytic institution cannot respond to an entirely new historical situation merely by applying rules developed for different circumstances. Institutional innovation must remain constantly guided by the very principles it seeks to preserve.
At that time, I was simultaneously involved in the two bodies most directly engaged in this work. I was a member of the IPA Committee for Eastern Europe, chaired by Charles Hanly, with whom I had long enjoyed a relationship of friendship and mutual confidence. At the same time, I served on the EPF Committee for Eastern Europe under the chairmanship of Han Groen Prakken, whose commitment to the development of psychoanalysis in Central and Eastern Europe proved decisive.
The two committees pursued remarkably similar objectives. They organised scientific meetings, welcomed colleagues from different countries, participated in interviews designed to identify those who might embark upon psychoanalytic training, and reflected on the most appropriate ways of supporting their development. It therefore seemed entirely natural that the two committees should work together.
This proposal was nevertheless declined. Han Groen Prakken wished to preserve the autonomy of the European Psychoanalytical Federation in relation to the International Psychoanalytical Association. At the time, I regarded this primarily as an organisational disagreement. Looking back, I now understand that it concerned something much deeper. Two institutions were pursuing the same objective while fearing that closer cooperation might threaten their respective identities. In other words, before reflecting on the modalities of transmission, it was first necessary to recognise the irreducible plurality of institutional identities.
This experience taught me that cooperation never requires the disappearance of differences. On the contrary, it presupposes their explicit recognition. An institution that feels secure in its own identity is capable of entering into dialogue with another; an institution that feels threatened is more likely to defend itself than to cooperate.
Several years later, this first experience found an unexpected continuation in the organisation of the first major scientific conference of the European Psychoanalytic Federation in Moscow in 1998. Nearly five hundred colleagues attended. Looking back today, I believe that this conference represented much more than an international scientific meeting. For the first time since psychoanalysis had been suppressed under the Stalinist regime, several hundred Russian colleagues were able to participate in an international conference organised by the EPF. The conference gave unprecedented visibility to the Russian psychoanalytic movement and made a major contribution to its subsequent development.
Yet it also brought into sharper focus the central question that remained unresolved: how could this extraordinary movement of renewal be transformed into a genuine process of psychoanalytic transmission? Enthusiasm alone was not enough. It had become necessary to invent institutional arrangements capable of sustaining long-term development. By the time I became Secretary General of the International Psychoanalytical Association, this issue had become unavoidable. Initiatives were multiplying across different countries. Their creativity was often remarkable, but they remained dispersed and sometimes poorly coordinated, giving rise to criticism that the development of psychoanalysis in Central and Eastern Europe had become fragmented or even "chaotic."
It was in this context that the idea gradually emerged of creating an Institute specifically devoted to this region of Europe. I now believe that the significance of this decision is often underestimated. The aim was not to establish yet another permanent psychoanalytic institution that would replace existing societies. Rather, it was to create a transitional institutional setting: one sufficiently stable to guarantee the quality of psychoanalytic training, yet sufficiently flexible to accompany an exceptional historical situation that was, by its very nature, destined to disappear as national societies gradually became autonomous.
Today, this notion of transition seems to me essential. Psychoanalytic institutions do not always respond to historical challenges by creating permanent structures. Sometimes they must invent temporary settings that make possible a development which would otherwise have remained unattainable.
It was from this perspective that, following a suggestion from the IPA Executive Director, a Memorandum of Understanding between the IPA and the EPF was progressively developed. At one level, it was a framework document defining the immediate commitments of both organisations in their collaboration with colleagues from Eastern Europe while establishing a transitional period of negotiation before the adoption of a final and binding agreement. Looking back, however, I realise that its significance extended far beyond its administrative function. It was neither a definitive treaty nor a mere declaration of intent. It created a genuinely transitional institutional space. While recognising the IPA's primary responsibility for psychoanalytic training, it also stated explicitly—at David Tuckett's request, then President of the EPF—that the European Psychoanalytical Federation should participate fully in every stage of the process.
I retain a vivid memory of the discussions preceding the adoption of the document. David Tuckett requested that the negotiations be extended by six months in order to ensure that, in every important provision, the shared responsibility of the two institutions would be clearly expressed. Whenever the International Psychoanalytical Association was mentioned, the European Psychoanalytical Federation should also appear. At first sight, this might have seemed merely a matter of editorial drafting. In reality, it expressed an entirely new conception of institutional relationships. The aim was no longer simply to distribute responsibilities between two organisations, but to recognise that a genuinely shared responsibility could be constructed without either institution surrendering its own identity. What was sought was neither fusion nor subordination, but an articulation that would allow each institution to remain faithful to its own vocation while participating in a common enterprise.
This evolution was also reflected in a reappraisal of the practical conditions of psychoanalytic training. General principles were not sufficient. Young colleagues had to be given real opportunities to undertake a personal analysis, receive supervision, and pursue psychoanalytic training without being obliged to abandon their professional activity or leave their country permanently.
It was in this spirit that I proposed the creation of a scholarship programme designed to support candidates undertaking training abroad. I vividly remember a particularly revealing discussion within the IPA Board. Otto Kernberg suggested that this financial support should take the form of repayable loans once candidates had become IPA members. His proposal, which was ultimately endorsed by the IPA Board, was perfectly coherent within a framework emphasising individual responsibility.
It nevertheless seemed to me that another perspective deserved consideration. These colleagues were not merely seeking personal assistance. They were participating in the collective reconstruction of psychoanalysis in countries where it had been interrupted for several decades. Supporting them therefore represented less an investment in individuals than a responsibility assumed by the international psychoanalytic community as a whole.
These two perspectives extended well beyond the financial issue itself. They reflected two complementary, though distinct, conceptions of transmission. One regarded psychoanalytic training primarily as an individual pathway. The other also understood it as a historical responsibility towards a generation called upon to re-establish psychoanalysis within its own country.
I also vividly remember the atmosphere within the IPA Board when the proposal to create the Institute was finally approved. The decision was greeted with prolonged applause, reflecting the shared awareness that the International Psychoanalytical Association had reached an important historical moment. Beyond the institutional decision itself, there was a palpable sense that psychoanalysis was opening a new chapter in its own history.
It was within the same context that the shuttle analysis procedure was gradually developed. Here again, the aim was not to modify the principles of psychoanalytic training, but to give them a form compatible with an exceptional historical situation. Candidates travelled regularly for one week—every month or every two months—to another country in order to continue their personal analysis and psychoanalytic training while remaining professionally active in their own country. Initially introduced as an experimental arrangement, shuttle analysis was subsequently recognised by the International Psychoanalytical Association as an acceptable training procedure, provided that the fundamental requirements of personal analysis remained fully respected. For candidates engaged in shuttle analysis, the Institute for Eastern Europe established a minimum requirement of one hundred analytic sessions per year.
Looking back today, I regard this recognition as one of the most significant achievements of that period. The innovation did not concern the principles of psychoanalytic training themselves. It concerned the institutional settings capable of preserving their meaning under unprecedented historical circumstances. The Institute, later named the Han Groen Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe (PIEE) in tribute to one of the principal architects of this opening towards Central and Eastern Europe, continued this work for more than a decade through a European Executive in which the EPF and the IPA worked closely together.
Several decades later, most countries of Central and Eastern Europe now have psychoanalytic societies recognised by the International Psychoanalytical Association. When I served as President of the European Psychoanalytical Federation, the IPA Board brought together approximately twenty Society Presidents. Today, it includes more than twice that number. This development represents far more than a geographical expansion. It bears witness to a profound transformation of the international psychoanalytic community itself.
III. Transforming a Normative Logic into a Culture of Dialogue: Training Models
The late 1990s were also marked by a profound transformation of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Reforms of its organisational structure, the creation of new representative bodies, and renewed reflection on the relationship between the regional federations and the IPA could easily have led to increasing competition between institutions pursuing, at least in part, similar objectives.
Looking back, however, I believe that the real challenge was never the distribution of authority or institutional power. Rather, it was to preserve the specific vocation of each institution while strengthening their capacity to work together. The European Psychoanalytical Federation was primarily devoted to fostering scientific inquiry, clinical exchanges, and dialogue among the different psychoanalytic traditions of Europe. The International Psychoanalytical Association assumed a more direct responsibility for psychoanalytic training, the recognition of component societies, and the international representation of psychoanalysis. These functions were not identical. They were profoundly complementary.
One of the most sensitive questions confronting both the European Psychoanalytical Federation and the International Psychoanalytical Association concerned the different training models. At first sight, this appeared to be a largely technical debate about the organisation of psychoanalytic training. In reality, a much more fundamental question was at stake: How can an international psychoanalytic community preserve common standards while recognising the diversity of the analytic traditions that constitute it?
For many years, this question had been approached primarily through a normative logic. Unity appeared to require the existence of a single reference model to which other traditions were implicitly expected to conform. During the 1990s, this issue became particularly significant in relation to the setting of the training analysis. The discussions focused especially on the weekly frequency of sessions. For many societies working within the official IPA model, four sessions a week were regarded as an essential requirement for psychoanalytic training. Other traditions had long adopted different practices: five sessions a week within the British Psychoanalytical Society, and three sessions a week within the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, while maintaining equally demanding standards of psychoanalytic training.
The debate risked becoming trapped in an opposition for which neither outcome seemed satisfactory. Either one sought to impose a single model, thereby overlooking the diversity of institutional histories and psychoanalytic practices; or each tradition defended its own model as an element of institutional identity that had become increasingly difficult to question. In either case, dialogue tended to give way to the confrontation of already established positions.
It was in this context that I proposed the creation, within the European Psychoanalytical Federation, of the Committee on the Setting, bringing together training analysts representing the principal European psychoanalytic traditions. Looking back, I believe that the committee's most important contribution lay not only in the work it produced but in the shift it introduced into the question itself. The issue was no longer which setting was the best. Instead, it became: What does the same analytic setting mean when it is embedded in different institutional histories, training traditions, and analytic cultures?
Today, this shift appears to me decisive. It transformed a normative debate into a genuine question for research. Rather than attempting to determine which position was correct, it became possible to explore how the meaning of the same analytic setting changed according to the context in which it had been developed and transmitted. This perspective had already found a particularly clear formulation in the report presented by Jacqueline Godfrind-Haber (1992). She showed that a setting of three sessions a week does not necessarily have the same meaning when it represents a reduction from an analytic framework normally conducted four or five times weekly as when it has, over several generations, constituted the customary setting of analytic work within another tradition.
Although apparently simple, this observation profoundly changed the way in which we could think about these differences. The setting ceased to be regarded as an abstract norm. It became inseparable from its own history, from the way it had been transmitted, and from the manner in which it was understood and invested by the analysts who practised within it. In other words, the central issue was no longer simply the number of weekly sessions. It had become the meaning of the analytic setting itself.
The work undertaken within the Committee on the Setting obviously did not eliminate the differences between psychoanalytic traditions. It did, however, make it possible to think about them differently. Gradually, it became possible to recognise that different training settings could satisfy comparable psychoanalytic requirements, provided that each rested upon a sufficiently coherent internal rationale and upon an explicit reflection on its own clinical practice. This was also the conclusion reached during the discussion of Jacqueline Godfrind-Haber's report at a whole day meeting of the EPF Board (Denzler, 1992).
This evolution reached an important milestone when the International Psychoanalytical Association formally recognised several training models: the Eitingon model, the French model, and the Uruguayan model. Supported in particular by Daniel Widlöcher, and a process in which I also participated, this decision was adopted by the IPA Board in 2007. Its significance was much greater than it appeared at the time. For the first time, the unity of the Association no longer rested upon the existence of a single training model. Instead, it came to rest upon the explicit recognition of several models, each understood not as a merely practical variation but as a coherent elaboration of psychoanalytic experience.
This decision did not eliminate debate or disagreement. It transformed their nature. The aim was no longer to persuade others to abandon their own tradition in favour of another. Instead, it became possible to ask what each model could contribute to our understanding of psychoanalytic training and what questions it addressed to the other models.
In my view, this marked a profound change in the way universality itself could be conceived within psychoanalysis. Universality does not necessarily depend upon the uniformity of institutional settings. It may also emerge through the recognition of several coherent approaches, each rooted in a particular institutional history while participating in a common psychoanalytic endeavour. The function of an international institution is therefore no longer primarily to impose a single norm. Rather, it is to create the conditions that enable different traditions to pursue a common enterprise without losing what constitutes their particular identity.
This evolution did not, of course, put an end to conflict. Tensions re-emerged some years later when the International Psychoanalytical Association introduced greater flexibility into the minimum requirements of the Eitingon model by recognising that, under certain circumstances, a training analysis conducted three times a week could also be accepted. This decision gave rise to considerable reservations within several European societies working within the Eitingon model, some of which decided to establish a separate body intended to preserve their own conception of psychoanalytic training.
The significance of this episode lies less in the disagreement itself than in what it reveals. No institutional decision can permanently eliminate conflict. Differences endure because they express deeply rooted institutional histories, theoretical traditions, and collective identities. What can change, however, is the way these differences are worked through.
I observed the same evolution within the Education Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Originally, its principal task had been to safeguard the standards of psychoanalytic training. Gradually, however, it also became a place of dialogue among psychoanalytic societies through the Meetings of Societies, in which I had the opportunity to represent the Paris Psychoanalytical Society.
What struck me most during these meetings was not that disagreements had disappeared. They often remained intense. Rather, because the IPA had recognised the legitimacy of different training models, these differences were increasingly experienced less as struggles over institutional legitimacy and more as the very subject matter of our common work. Looking back, I regard this as one of the most significant institutional transformations that I witnessed during those years. A scientific institution fulfils its function neither by erasing differences nor merely by arbitrating between them. It fulfils it by creating the conditions under which those differences themselves become objects of inquiry and collective elaboration.
The same issue arises today in the ongoing discussions concerning remote analysis. Here again, the question is not to oppose two irreconcilable conceptions of psychoanalytic practice. The IPA current position clearly affirms that in-person analysis remains the reference model for psychoanalytic training. At the same time, it recognises that exceptional circumstances may justify the use of remote sessions, provided that their place within the analytic process is carefully considered, appropriately limited, and regularly reassessed. Once again, the essential issue is not the application of an abstract rule irrespective of circumstances. It is how an institution remains faithful to its fundamental principles while continually rethinking the conditions under which those principles are implemented in new historical contexts.
IV. The Third Function: Creating the Conditions for Collective Thinking
Looking back today, these different experiences appear to me as successive stages in a single line of reflection on what I would now call the third function of a psychoanalytic institution. This function did not reveal itself all at once. Rather, it gradually evolved through experience. In the early scientific settings developed by the European Psychoanalytical Federation, it emerged around the clinical case, which became a shared object of reflection among psychoanalysts belonging to different traditions. During the development of psychoanalysis in Central and Eastern Europe, it shifted towards the settings of transmission, designed to preserve the fundamental principles of psychoanalytic training under exceptional historical circumstances. Finally, in the debates concerning the different training models, the third object was no longer simply the clinical case or the process of transmission itself. Increasingly, the differences between the models became objects of inquiry rather than grounds for opposition.
Each time, an institution found itself confronted with a particular form of polarisation : between theoretical traditions ; between institutions ; between training models; between fidelity to fundamental principles and the necessity for innovation. None of these tensions could simply be eliminated. Yet each of them could be transformed. That transformation resulted less from the decisions that were taken than from the gradual invention of settings through which these differences themselves could become objects of thought.
It is perhaps here that psychoanalytic experience offers something distinctive to institutional reflection. In our clinical work, we know that no interpretation, however accurate it may be, is sufficient in itself to produce lasting transformation. What makes such transformation possible is the analytic situation as a whole: the continuity of the work, the stability of the setting, the capacity to contain psychic conflict and to facilitate its gradual elaboration.
Jean-Luc Donnet's reflections in The Analyzing Situation (2005) provide, I believe, a particularly fruitful way of developing this idea. By distinguishing the site from the analyzing situation, Donnet shows that the site represents what he calls "the instituted dimension of psychoanalysis," that is, the inaugural material and symbolic conditions through which the psychoanalytic method becomes possible. At the same time, he explicitly rejects the temptation to attribute to the setting either a simple causal function or an identity-defining value. The site does not produce the analytic process ; rather, it constitutes its instituted condition of possibility. It is within the analyzing situation—whose present participle appropriately expresses, in Donnet's words, "the primacy of the dynamic point of view"—that the processes of symbolization giving analytic work its genuinely processual character can gradually unfold.
This distinction seems to me particularly illuminating for thinking about institutional life. Just as the analytic situation cannot be reduced to the physical setting of the consulting room, an institutional situation cannot be reduced to administrative structures or organisational procedures. At the same time, however, just as the consulting room, the couch, the regularity of the sessions, and the analyst's physical presence all belong to the analytic site, the material places through which an institution lives also form part of what might be called its institutional site. They do not themselves produce scientific life. They make it possible.
This perspective also sheds light on certain institutional decisions that might otherwise appear secondary. The acquisition of the EPF House in Brussels in 2015, under the presidency of Serge Frisch, was not simply an administrative or financial decision. It reflected the intuition that an international scientific community also requires a place where a shared history, regular encounters, informal conversations, and collective reflection can gradually develop.
A house does not create dialogue. Yet it can become one of the constitutive elements of the institutional site from which a genuine institutional situation may emerge. This dimension seems all the more important today as the development of remote analysis invites us to distinguish more carefully between what belongs to the site and what belongs to the situation. Remote sessions may, under particular circumstances, enable an already established analytic process to continue. They cannot, however, render the material presence of analyst and patient in the consulting room fully equivalent. The materiality of the place itself—the journey, the waiting room, the couch or the armchair—forms part of the analytic site and contributes to the conditions under which the analyzing situation can unfold.
It seems to me that a similar, though necessarily cautious, analogy may be proposed for psychoanalytic institutions. Online exchanges have become an invaluable enrichment of international scientific life. Yet they cannot entirely replace meetings in person, through which a community gradually builds a shared memory, common working habits, and a lived experience of thinking together. A psychoanalytic institution is therefore defined less by the rigidity of its rules than by its capacity to invent institutional sites and institutional situations that enable an analytic community to continue thinking together despite its differences.
Conclusion: Preserving the Conditions for Collective Thinking
Looking back on this journey, it seems to me that the experiences described in these different sections extend far beyond the historical circumstances that originally gave rise to them. Neither the European Psychoanalytical Federation nor the International Psychoanalytical Association is the same institution that I knew during the 1980s and 1990s. Generations have changed, the geopolitical landscape has been profoundly transformed, the globalization of psychoanalysis has opened new perspectives, and digital technologies, together with the recent experience of remote analysis, have raised unprecedented questions concerning both psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic training.
Yet, reflecting today on this experience, I am struck by the persistence of the question that has run through it from the beginning: How can a psychoanalytic institution continue to create the conditions for shared thinking in a world where new forms of polarisation constantly emerge? At every stage, a particular form of polarisation threatened to immobilise thought—between theoretical traditions, between institutions, between training models, or between fidelity to fundamental principles and the necessity for innovation. Each time, however, the response did not consist in eliminating these differences but in creating the conditions under which they could be worked through.
It is perhaps here that the deepest form of transmission within a psychoanalytic institution may be found. What is transmitted is not only a body of theory, a set of training requirements, or a clinical tradition. What is also transmitted is a way of working with differences, of inhabiting disagreement without seeking to abolish it, and of preserving a space in which shared thinking may continue to develop.
This conviction has gradually led me to reconsider my own understanding of leadership. For many years, I would probably have defined it as the capacity to assume responsibility or to make difficult decisions. Today, I understand it differently. Leadership consists less in resolving conflicts than in preserving the conditions under which a scientific community remains capable of thinking about its own disagreements. A scientific community remains alive when it accepts that pluralism is not a problem to be solved but a condition of its vitality.
Throughout this journey, I have never forgotten the quality of reflection, the cordiality of our exchanges, and the spirit of cooperation that characterised the successive Executives and Councils of the European Psychoanalytical Federation. The transformations I have described were never the achievement of a single individual; they always emerged from collective work. If I mention a few colleagues here, it is not to establish a comprehensive list, but because each of them, in a different way, embodies an essential dimension of that shared experience.
I think first of Betty Denzler, Secretary of the EPF, colleague and friend, whose institutional intelligence, generosity, and the constant quality of our exchanges often helped me, throughout my four years as President, to face situations that were sometimes delicate or controversial. I also think of Gabriele Junkers, who, as Editor of the Bulletin, did far more than redesign its editorial presentation. She also gave symbolic visibility to the Federation's three official languages by assigning each its own colour—green for German, red for English, and blue for French—thus expressing, through the very form of our publication, the unity of a community that respected its linguistic and cultural diversity. Finally, I think of James Innes-Smith, whose analytic experience, institutional wisdom, and personal qualities profoundly marked the life of the Federation. His sudden death in January 1999, just as he was about to succeed me as President, was a painful loss for his family, his friends, and for the entire EPF community.
The questions that lie ahead—the evolution of training models, new forms of transmission, remote analysis, the consequences of globalisation, and the expectations of younger generations of psychoanalysts—are unlikely ever to find definitive answers. Like those that preceded them, they will require spaces in which differences can be thought about rather than merely arbitrated.
Perhaps this is, ultimately, the principal lesson I take from my years of responsibility within the European Psychoanalytical Federation and the International Psychoanalytical Association. A psychoanalytic institution does not remain alive because it jealously protects its identity. It remains alive because it preserves the conditions under which that identity can continue to evolve without losing itself.
For this reason, I now understand the third function less as a particular modality of leadership than as a permanent responsibility for transmission. To transmit is not simply to preserve an inheritance. It is to create the conditions through which an analytic community may continue to think together about what, without the work of symbolization, might otherwise become a source of institutional division—or even of institutional splitting. If psychoanalysis has a distinctive contribution to make to the life of its own institutions, it may well lie precisely here: to preserve, at the very heart of difference, the conditions for shared thinking.