What really matters and the future of psychoanalysis

EPF 60^th Celebration.

What is the purpose of an international psychoanalytic organisation like the EPF?

What are the problems such an organisation faces in meeting its purpose and how can they best be managed for the future of psychoanalysis?

I am very grateful to Jan Abram and the Executive for asking me to contribute a paper to this symposium and to reflect on “the experience of leading the EPF as President as well as the factors impacting on the EPF today and the future”.

The invitation threw me back to the summer day in 1999 when, after being asked if I would be willing to stand as president, I had to ask myself the two questions above and quickly. It was an election taking place in the shadow of the sad and premature death of the president-elect, James Innes-Smith, from Belgium, just as he should have assumed office. He had prepared carefully and creatively for the role and there was also a major review of the EPF and how it was working that was ongoing, conducted under the presidency of Alan Gibeault. Alain had agreed to stay on for a few months along with his executive until a new president could be elected in November.

The EPF in 1999 had been developing for 30 years from the period of its foundation described by Han Groen-Prakken (1986).

Beginnings

Her article, recommended as background reading for this meeting is salutary. She describes carefully but bluntly the evolution of the EPF from early meetings between European Training Analysts and the problems of its foundation and first ten years. Among them, frustration, great uncertainty among some societies as to what was the point, anxieties about a new organization disturbing the existing functioning of individual societies, worry about negative effects on existing meetings (such as the English, French and German speaking meetings) and concern about whether the new organization would be separate from, part of, or subservient to the International. In the discussions some were inspired by the idea of a European organization. But she also describes language problems, attending presidents being overwhelmed by pressures, problems developing trust, problems being open with one another, how easily suspicion and paranoia could develop, an absolute determination that the new organization would not on any account have a regulatory function over training standards in societies, and huge differences between national societies in their approach to organizational issues like minute taking. She also quotes the then Dutch president as writing how “everybody approved in principle, but when the concrete question is raised of how to realize this idea, the discussion becomes vague…” In any case from very lengthy and difficult discussions, a core principle emerged - that the organization should be a loose federation, not an association, and should limit itself to promoting “scientific” understanding and exchange by organizing meetings about “common problems”. Even then there was “trouble between the Executive Bureau and the Societies” and problems of management within the Bureau.

Like the organizers of this symposium, I strongly recommend the article.

Thinking about whether to stand for election, I was briefed on how the EPF worked by Don Campbell (President of the British Society and so then a member of Council) and Gabriele Junkers (then the Bulletin Editor). I learned from them about what happened in meetings and about historical understandings developed from experience that were written in a document, known as the Red Book, in which various conventions governing what the Federation did, how its various meetings were set up and more subtle issues such as the distinction between what the IPA and the EPF did, which was considered fundamental, were mentioned^{1 2}.

The EPF in 1999 was constituted as a federation (not an association³) based on Swiss law which functioned via a set of formal and informal traditions coded into a “red book”. Legitimate authority was clearly held by the Council (i.e. the presidents of the IPA component societies in Europe) and, according to the constitution, Council decisions were to be carried out, between its six-monthly meetings, by a small executive (the bulletin editor, the treasurer, two vice-presidents and the president, all elected by Council individually except for the General Secretary who was appointed by the president.)

At the time it was very clear how the issues Groen Prakken described had been resolved. The EPF existed for the European societies and their members to share ideas and clinical and training practices – called “scientific” purposes. Questions of training regulation, ethics, and political representation (and especially issues about how individual societies carried on their business), loosely known as political issues, were not for EPF. They were to be IPA matters and the EPF was not to be considered a regional component of the IPA. Another strong norm impressed on me was that the EPF should never organize meetings in any of the European counties without an invitation from the society (or societies) in that country who would then be expected to help formulate the event.

The EPF in 1999

I also learned that under my predecessor Alain Gibeault, the Council and the Executive had reviewed how the EPF was then functioning by creating a number of working groups of society presidents and executive members. They were particularly concerned about passivity and lack of continuity among the council members and the need for a scientific policy with priorities. To this end they had organized an impressive study day in Lisbon for the day before the election in November 1999 - to look at the organization and decide if it was fit for purpose. I was given the preparatory papers. From the Executive, Emma Piccioli, Henk-Jan Dalewijk, Betty Denzler, Imre Szecsödy, Gabriele Junkers and Alain had each chaired one of the working groups with five or six presidents from the council in each. The issues covered in the papers included:

1. General administration (where the conclusion was that more attention should be brought to bear on the conduct and structure of Council meetings and of all those elements guaranteeing continuity between presidents and the transmission of information between Executive and Council (Red Book, summaries of events, reports of Executive meetings etc.).
2. How to improve budgeting.
3. How to improve the continuity between rotating members of council.
4. The need for a general scientific policy and changes to the conferences in line with its priorities.
5. How to collaborate more on scientific (but not regulatory) aspects of training issues with the IPA - including the possible organisation of scientific events to understand different training models, investigation of the conceptual differences between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and the setting up of small working groups to stimulate ongoing research. These were the priority issues for a scientific policy.
6. More support for developing psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe.
7. The creation of an EPF website and online bulletin and archive. (Technical change was fast at this time and European psychoanalysts quick to adapt. Alain’s executive and council used fax, a year later Eike Wolf and Gabriele Junkers had set up email and a website.)

Preparing my election statement, I committed myself to the outcomes of these discussions and added ideas about the kind of scientific policy I thought the EPF should have, if it was to meet the priorities the Council working parties had begun to identify.

To this effect I suggested that the main task of a pan European meeting was to work together at understanding in depth how best to do psychoanalysis, to promote psychoanalysis (Interface), to train psychoanalysts and to understand psychoanalysis.

At the time I had been Joint Editor or Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for 12 years and had become very aware that we not only had a “pluralistic psychoanalysis”, as it was called, but that very different things were practiced and called psychoanalysis and that many concepts were understood in completely different, even conflicting, ways, although as Bohleber (2013, 2015) and Varvin (2017) and others have later shown, this was not widely realised⁴.

In my address, I wrote that that “while pluralism and tolerance are greatly to be welcomed in the face of the previous dogma and authoritarianism, we do now risk becoming muddled. To go forward we need to respect all of the views among us but we also need to debate differences robustly and rigorously.⁵

The EPF’s New Scientific Policy

The EPF’s New Scientific Policy of 2000 (Tuckett, 2002) and the later Ten-year Scientific initiative of 2003/4 (Tuckett, 2003) which attempted to set out to establish answers to the two questions with which I began, did not, therefore, emerge from thin air. They were the outcome of teamwork. Against the Lisbon background (and with Emma, Henk Jan, Imre and Gabriele all continuing on the executive for the next two years), it was relatively easy to consolidate what had been agreed in Lisbon and the ideas I had brought into my election statement from my Journal experience into the policies the Council then adopted.

The EPF’s New Scientific Policy proposed annual (rather than bi-annual) conferences less controlled by a main theme, a series of working parties involving both leaders in the field⁶ and a much wider group of volunteers who were given objectives for their enquiries, and a much more open approach to who could offer a paper and about what⁷. The overall idea was to get people knowing each other and their practices better and to work together across Europe. Another decision was to partner with the IPA to establish the IPA Han Groen-Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe, under a European Director, Paolo Fonda.

The document laying out the scientific policy, after discussion at length, modification and preliminary agreement at the London and then Madrid Councils, was placed in the Bulletin and on the website (ref Bulletin 54, 2000 (Page 111-118)). Several features of what was decided are important for our present discussion. The document stated:

1. The EPF scientific policy should aim to encourage rigorous and sustained work between European colleagues in the member societies based on four principles: working in depth; the encouragement of small well-motivated groups with personal relationships; continuity and assessment of results (of discussions or events).
2. The EPF scientific policy should be focused on encouraging rigorous and sustained activities, securely backed by evidence, in four core areas aimed at boosting improved clinical work, improved educational activity, clarification of theoretical positions and understanding of how best to try to diffuse our core discipline in the wider world (Interface).
3. To implement the scientific policy objectives;
   (1) The EPF would create and monitor four working parties⁸ (initially called "think tanks"). Their task would be to assist the Council to investigate issues of concern to many society presidents and to monitor our efforts rigorously in the four core areas and to help achieve a Europe-wide scientific programme based on the principles of working on specific issues in depth; the encouragement of small well-motivated groups; continuity and assessment; and
   (2) the EPF would hold an annual main conference in a new style - involving a number of parallel themes and sessions and aiming to make it easier for personal relationships to form across societies and gradually to implement the policy objectives. A specific objective would be to provide a regular, enjoyable and exciting setting for meeting and learning from each other in small groups on a very wide range of topics. There would be opportunity for anyone to propose a paper or set up an “allied group”- for example on child analysis, psychoanalysis in forensic psychiatry, issues in distance supervision, etc.
4. The function of the Executive of the EPF/FEP would be to create the conditions for groups across societies to get established and meet, to develop objectives, to be given time to facilitate group participation, to provide the circumstances for them to add members, to report and to gain feedback and to monitor their achievement of objectives.

Continuity and teamwork.

These ideas developed with experience, but what I want to stress here is the degree of continuity between the two administrations and also the teamwork that took place to ensure what had been discussed at length was agreed in the context of a respected and acknowledged prior institutional framework.

Picking up on points 1 and 3 of the Lisbon study day, we took great care (and the incoming General Secretary, Gabriele Junkers, went to enormous lengths) to allow the time to create close working relations between the Society Presidents who made up the Council (the legitimate constitutional authority) and the Executive (as a group elected individually by Council to develop and implement ideas Council agreed on.) We wanted the presidents to know it was their EPF and that our scientific discussions should be on matters of concern to them and their societies. We also made clear that our working relations needed to rest on a set of written rules (the Red book), the written constitution, and the papers and minutes of Council meetings, but also and above all on a strong set of norms about working together which had characterised the EPF during its birth as described by Han Groen-Prakken and then been crystallised by Alain and his colleagues, albeit that it was always fragile in implementation.

The importance of the key themes in the Lisbon discussions - the problem of how to keep society presidents well-informed and active (rather than passive), how to make sure the EPF addressed issues that mattered to them and how to pass on information between them as one succeeded another - cannot be overemphasised. Many society presidents had only two-year terms. Most reported that it was difficult (even if they did have confident English) to work out what was going on at their first meeting or two and were unsure as to their role, creating a constant tendency towards withdrawal, passivity anxiety, defensiveness or even paranoia. Council met only twice a year so by the time people found their feet they might be leaving. The Lisbon papers stressed these potential difficulties to active participation and advocated a number of ways to overcome them on which we tried to follow through. They included setting up small groups of presidents so they could induct each other and have time to discuss matters of mutual interest.

As part of this approach, prior to my first council meeting, I invited every president either to dinner in my home or at a restaurant so that we could all get to know each other, I could make clear my ideas about a scientific programme and we could establish that they were the decision-makers. We also instituted various informal procedures to welcome every new president at each council and Gabriele would speak to many of them regularly by phone to try to bring them into a “working group”. We kept emphasising that it was the society presidents, not the executive, who needed to take responsibility for what was decided, and the executive began the practice of not using the votes they were constitutionally entitled to cast, whenever Council held a vote – an actual and symbolic way to signal the authority of the society presidents.

Writing this paper, I asked Gabriele Junkers how she remembered those days:

“…after a while people were enthused, being firstly happy that they were given opportunities to talk to one another about the things that concern them at home on a daily basis, but now in a securely contained manner by an aim and by structure! The immense gratitude for opening this containing way of going ahead was expressed in the endless applause when Tuckett was leaving. I myself even would like to add that my period with David and Evelyne has been the most inspiring, enthusing psychoanalytic period during my life, as it was a clear and open communication and not avoiding conflicts – only sometimes a bit too quick to follow for those not having English as mother tongue.”

It was against this background that the first results of the new conferences and the initial work of the new working parties were experienced and then led to Council formulating what became the EPF’s Ten-year Scientific Initiative, to be funded from a special reserve of €500,000⁹ available due to the skill of the two treasurers¹⁰ and the success of the new conferences.

The Initiative set ambitious aims for the EPF.

Task 1 was to achieve a series of clearly described and identifiable “best practice” ways of working psychoanalytically (written down and illustrated by clinical examples in as much depth as possible, covering the main types of doing psychoanalysis in an acceptable manner in Europe).

Task 4 was to achieve descriptions of the effectiveness of our different educational systems – examining different ways of doing supervision, curriculum content, training requirements, training analysis, assessing readiness at the end of training, etc.

Task 6 was to build up knowledge of effective referral systems in different societies that could be learned from along with skills as to how best to make an offer of psychoanalysis to a potential patient.

More ambitious tasks, which followed these core descriptive tasks, were to try to gain knowledge of the different effects of different approaches to clinical work and training and to begin to publish studies on these efforts and create a peer review culture of colleagues willing to test what they were doing.

Given such ambitious aims, it was well understood at the time that different European societies would participate more or less in different tasks. (The only objective about which there was contention was the one suggesting that we should try to work with universities towards these goals.)

There was at this point what I think of as a working group (in Bion’s sense) in council and a huge interest in understanding each other and our differences. On the council, in the working parties and in many groups, new friendships and new working relationships were developing across societies. Presidents were taking part in the working parties.

The minutes of Council for Sorrento in 2003 show that the incoming president-elect who was a member of the Executive and had stood unopposed, when asked a direct question, stated that she supported the initiative, fully endorsing its main principles and approach and “finding it useful as a basis for her term of office”. Significant and useful work within the framework of the initiative was done over the years that followed. Groups of psychoanalysts from different societies worked closely together. It all resulted in peer reviewed publications by the Working parties on Theoretical Issues (Canestri, 2006), Comparative Clinical Methods (Tuckett et al, 2024), Initiating Psychoanalysis (Reith, 2015, Reith et al, 2018) and the End of Training Assessment initiative, which was part of the Working Party on Education (Erlich, 2010; Erlich and Erlich, 2018; Junkers et al, 2008; 2015 et al) as well as by some of the other groups set up at that time.

I do not know if Council later discussed or assessed the overall programme or the work published or whether it decided subsequently to work further on or abandon the various tasks. They probably remain relevant?

Democracy and Science

So much for how I found the EPF in 1999 and what we tried to do in the next few years. I now turn to the question of democracy, that is the theme of this symposium, and to its role in a scientific organization, as well as what I see going on in the EPF today.

As a preamble, two definitions seem in order:

Democracy, I suggest, is a political philosophical concept much in current discussion and contention. Importantly, as well as giving power to the “people” (although not always all of them) democratic organizations typically contain various institutional features about precisely how and to whom legitimate authority has been delegated by whom and for what purpose.

Science, on the other hand, is a term usually deployed in the epistemological sense of a system (institutions) for arriving at a body of conclusions as to how specific aspects of the world “work”. These conclusions are more or less consensually believed rather widely to be accurate due to public and disciplined exploration of what we think we know about something, how and why we think we know it, and how we test our beliefs.

Work Group and Basic Assumption Group, are two other concepts (capturing different affective and cognitive group states) which, invented by Wilfred Bion (1952), are relevant to how a group or organization orients itself to its mission. In a work group, contributions are valued for their potential usefulness to achieving the mission in the world. In a basic assumption group, contributions are valued for their potential usefulness to making the group feel good about itself. As Bion wrote, a scientific attitude is a work group attitude.

Asked to think about “democracy” and the EPF, I did some research, beginning with a textual analysis of the EPF constitution in 1999, the documents used at the Lisbon meeting in 1999 and the documents setting out the New Scientific Policy and the Ten-Year initiative. In these documents I find no mention of the word democracy or its derivatives at all! I also looked at the Groen-Prakken article. In that there are three references, but none relate to psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic organization.

As I have summarised, what you do find in all the documents of this period is a great deal of discussion of the EPF’s constitutional scientific mission, understood, as in Lisbon, as to facilitate the European societies and their members sharing ideas about psychoanalysis and core clinical and training practices – “scientific purposes”. Reading the documents also makes very clear that there are different ways of doing things and that these differences are the very thing we want to understand properly and study together.

The text analysis also illustrates a remarkable contrast with the argument we were sent for this meeting. One feature of the latter that struck me was that the word democracy seemed to be being used to legitimate the selection of topics and speakers (after the presidential panel) by the executive. For example, the choice had apparently been “democratic” because each member of the current executive got a turn to choose a sub-topic and who might address it. (I was reminded of 5^th Century Athenian democracy in which the citizens but not the slaves were voting.)

In any case, the rest of the argument spoke of things like the EPF’s “journey” to become a “vital, expanding organization at 60…” demonstrating “its resilience”. To me this emphasis also stood out. It seemed to focus on the success of the survival of the organization rather than the success of its purpose – psychoanalysts learning from their differences.

Finally, “the future of psychoanalysis in Europe”, it was asserted, “depends on…[the EPF’s] ability to uphold the values of individual and societal maturity, emotional freedom, and respectful partnership, continuously embodying the democratic values that allow it to evolve and flourish across continents of diverse cultures and languages”. Lofty words but for me a bit mystifying and without much content as a future policy statement for a scientific organization – particularly one concerned with psychoanalysis in which conflict of all sorts, based in never more than partially managing infantile sexual conflicts, are usually understood to be only temporarily resolvable, especially in institutions.

Increasingly puzzled, for comparison I also looked at the published editorial statements for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis on the occasions of its 50^th, 75^th and 100^th anniversaries as well as Jones’, famous editorial obituary in the same Journal on the occasion of Freud’s death (Jones, 1940). These statements were all made on anniversaries and their authors all chose to address the scientific direction of psychoanalysis as well as, in some instances, issues of how knowledge is legitimated. But nowhere was democratic organization mentioned. Moreover, text analysis of the articles in these additional sources brought up the words democracy or democratic only twice – in neither instance were the words applied to the organization of psychoanalytic scientific policy.

Why, I then wondered, had our current EPF Executive not chosen to follow suit? Several topics for an anniversary celebration struck me as potentially relevant. For example, why not ask if we understand each other better now than 20 years ago? Do we agree that Freud’s procedure remains necessary to discover the unconscious mental processes hindering a patient’s wellbeing? Or is it the case that in our practice infantile sexual conflicts are still at the core of our work? Or how we recognize transference templates (Freud’s core idea) in sessions today? Or, perhaps, more broadly, as Dana Birksted-Breen asked for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ 100^th anniversary, how is the unconscious being understood and worked with differently in contemporary psychoanalysis and have we moved away from Freud’s ideas or not and for what reasons? Many other topics were possible.

Current Policy

As I pursued these reflections, it gradually dawned on me that as far as I could tell from what is public, the EPF executive now controls who talks on what at conferences although it currently has no Council agreed and published scientific policy priorities as to what debates in psychoanalysis are needed or how successful the EPF is being in achieving greater shared understanding among us. Instead, there are ideas about pluralistic values about how to debate - being respectful, mature, democratic, etc. Particularly obvious to me was that the EPF had not been inviting papers or holding conferences or establishing working groups to help the society presidents with a main issue that I believe has been causing them a great deal of grief - namely what we know about how to train psychoanalysts and what we need to do to ensure that even in a digital world future psychoanalysts continue to use their unconscious (as understood by Freud) at the core of their work.

I now wondered if presidents were asked what they thought the topic for this meeting should be?

I now began to hypothesise that perhaps this absence of scientific content was a sign. Had “anything goes” pluralism, as I call it (Tuckett, 2002, 2025), now taken over to the extent that perhaps the EPF Executive had come to feel so handicapped by fear of uncontainable conflict and hatred among colleagues taking different psychoanalytic positions that they had abdicated from discussing them at all? Had “respect” for difference taken the place of substantive discussion on core issues resulting in an unrecognised retreat from a scientific policy and even a retreat from psychoanalysis¹¹.

Reflecting on all this while writing this paper, I received notice of the publication of a special issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association on psychoanalytic education, which although mainly North American in focus, does attempt to grasp the nettle of avoiding difference and its consequences. The volume has a number of contributions including by Shmuel and Mira Erlich, Fred Busch and myself. But most interesting are the concluding remarks of the Guest Editor, Alan Silverman. He writes:

“One area of general agreement that is explicit for some of our authors and implicit with others appears to be a recognition that pluralism is no longer the panacea that it once seemed. For many of us, the advent of pluralism, around the dawn of this century, seemed like a welcome respite from the theory wars that had characterized the last quarter of the 20th century. It served as a notable improvement from the dogmatism and schisms that had characterized so much of psychoanalytic history until that time. Instead of fighting over whose model was the correct one, psychoanalysts adopted a strategy that allowed candidates and graduate analysts to choose what school of thought they found most useful…What could be more reasonable than to agree to politely disagree and await further clinical and theoretical advances that might settle the various debates within our discipline? Many of us assumed that pluralism was just a stage in our field’s evolution, one that would give way eventually to some overall integrated psychoanalytic model of the mind, encompassing the new information and technical approaches of more recent theories while melding them with the more traditional ideas and approaches that had withstood the test of time.

This failed to happen, however. Each new school or model took on an exclusive life of its own. Rather than melding the new ideas and ways of working together, psychoanalysis became Balkanized…the number of schools proliferated and the idea that each analytic dyad was so unique that only they could determine if they were working psychoanalytically took hold. As this happened, psychoanalysis became increasingly fragmented while seeming chaotic (Blass, 2010; Jimenez, 2006). Bernardi (2002, 2003, 2005) and Wilson (2000), among others, became increasingly concerned with the increasing incoherence of psychoanalytic theory and technique” (Silverman 2026, p 612

In other words, at least in North America, where “anything goes” pluralism has been most rampant, it seems it may be becoming clear that it is time to do more than just be respectful and tolerant.

Various things that had reached me about the way the EPF now functions, but which I had not fully realised might have significance, then appeared in my mind as candidate selected facts in support of my thesis that a (no doubt unintended) shift towards control and autocracy had taken place

• The EPF’s “new style” conference has now reverted to being a conference controlled with a general theme. Most of the “new features” aiming to allow many flowers to bloom have gone.
• The Working parties, in the sense of council-backed groups of analysts from different countries, asked to investigate and report on core matters of general interest over a medium to long period, have gone.
• Individual offers of papers by EPF members or groups of members are now not welcome or possible. What is possible is decided by an executive in an opaque way¹².
• The EPF constitution has been changed drastically with the jurisdiction moved away from Switzerland. The effect of the change is that whereas once the Council was the authority and the Executive carried out policy, now the Executive officially and legally functions as a Board of Directors and “an assembly of presidents” exist to ratify them. The EPF is de facto and de jure now an “association”.
• Among other changes in the constitution, of which I am unsure about the origin, one is that the EPF president now formally represents European psychoanalysis to the IPA, so that the EPF has become a political organization and a regional unit of the IPA.
• The constitutional changes and the reasons behind them, as far as I am aware were not advertised in the Bulletin (or website) to the societies and their membership so that there could be the six-month period of discussion (and reflection) as the Swiss constitution required. It is unclear to me when and how they happened or what the minutes of the meetings authorising the changes show.
• The “Red Book” has been completely changed. I could not find archive copies easily – which means many of the valuable informal understanding and norms once relied on have faded, particularly the need for society presidents to be well informed about the EPF as they begin, helped to participate actively, and to pass on their knowledge to their successors.

Taking all these changes together, and I want to stress I have no evidence any of this was intended, what seems to have gone on in plain sight (but without reflection against the Federation’s original purpose) is a process of increasing executive control and de facto authoritarian decision-making.

It seems likely that all this is the outcome of many small decisions that seemed sensible at the time but which were made without checking on institutional history or perhaps consulting those who had come before who might have been able to warn about consequences not foreseen – to stress again, the Lisbon discussion contained ideas about how to avoid what we might call ahistorical or structural blindness. Certainly, within the EPF’s administrative archive and the Bulletin archive (including hopefully in back up versions of the website) the relevant papers setting out how the EPF was to operate could have been consulted, as could key people who went deep into these matters during their terms of office such as Alain Gibeault, Gabriele Junkers, Henk-Jan Daliwyk, myself, and others who followed.

Moving Forward

Is my argument just an attempt to suggest “we did it better in the past”? Perhaps, but I hope not.

Rather, these remarks are intended as a serious and urgent contribution to the future of psychoanalysis in Europe. The need to discuss and understand the core scientific issues the EPF was created to address is more urgent than ever. There is also a parallel between the apparent fact that no one has actually chosen the path the EPF is now on and my impression that although many of today’s psychoanalysts practice in a way that has somehow moved far away from Freud’ procedure and method for investigating unconscious mental processes, this has happened without an explicit decision or supporting reasoning.

In my view the current Council could turn the EPF away from the path it has somehow taken at its next meeting by taking immediate steps to recover an appetite for substantive discussion between European colleagues devoted to understanding in depth the core issues of our discipline – especially our interesting differences as to training and practice and the reasons for them.

My contribution to the JAPA special issue (Tuckett, 2026b) was very much based on my experience working closely in depth with people from well over 15 countries in the working parties over 25 years. I argue that two broadly different methods of working among contemporary members of the IPA practicing what they call psychoanalysis can now be identified.

One, called Type Z, is a method in which the core features of practice are broadly consistent with Freud’s definition of psychoanalysis as a procedure, a method and a body of theory (as referred to by Evelyne Sechaud in her contribution). Much practice in all parts of Europe, the United States and Latin America can be described in these terms. But not all. A second type is Type X, in which, whether by intention or otherwise, practice has left behind aspects of Freud’s approach – whether procedure, method or theory.

Of course, disciplines cannot stay stuck and refuse to innovate. Just because Freud said so is not a good argument. However, my purpose in specifying Type Z is to see if we can dig deeper.

The idea is to stop claiming we all do the same when, clearly, we do not and, for example, to challenge all those who wish to train psychoanalysts, to spell out, in relation to Freud’s definitions, exactly what they are trying to provide. I refer here to what an Institute might advocate as intentionally the same or different to Freud’s model as well as to the need to spell out supporting theories and, where it exists, the reasoning behind any shift. For example, does an institute train candidates to use Freud’s procedure of free association and evenly hovering attention as a normal setting for everyday psychoanalytic sessions? If not, what variations are advocated and for what reasons? A debate about differences framed in that kind of way could open the way to recognizing differences much more adequately than at present. Debating the underlying conflicts in a professional and constructive way could improve practice and personal relations as well as provide a foundation for policy decisions in areas like training requirements.

If I am right that the EPF has been driven to avoid “proper” scientific discussion about the core issues on which it was founded and instead got caught up in political rhetoric and basic assumption functioning (a concern with itself rather than its purpose), then can we turn back, putting aside blame, to think urgently about recognising and then reversing the various subtle moves towards authoritarianism that have taken place, even if they were unintentional and cloaked in democratic language?

Something like the following would be necessary.

1. Accept that although the EPF constitution may have been changed for pragmatic reasons, this happened without a debate about its wider effects. To put the presidents back in charge, we could quite easily reinstate the Swiss constitution for running the Federation and use the Belgian company solely as a subsidiary association run by the Executive (as a Board of Directors) to handle money and contracts, as agreed by Council decisions.
2. Revive the Red Book (looking for what has gone missing) and restore and elaborate the formal and informal measures (such as those taken in Alain’s and my presidencies) that were created to help Society presidents take charge.
3. Urgently develop a scientific policy framework aimed at how we intend to understand in depth our different training and clinical practices and other core questions the societies have about psychoanalysis.
4. Return to a new style conference framework:
• Minimising formal pre-defined themes and centrally controlled plenary sessions
• Encourage submissions, openness and transparent peer review and not political control.
• Encourage ongoing work in and between societies and between groups of members on topics of vital importance and make it possible to display it at conferences.
• Use technology to allow participants to vote with their feet as to whom they want to hear talking about what.
5. By changing the constitution back to its Swiss version put political issues out of the EPF so that it can be re-established as a scientific organization dedicated to a work group approach to sharing and understanding our differences in depth.
6. Assist the European presidents to develop a framework formally outside the EPF for political (regulatory) matters. They need a nuanced and effective way to represent their views on regulation and other matters to the IPA and to try to develop a consensus position independent of the EPF executive, who would be focusing on the scientific programme. An obvious solution is for the European Board representatives on the IPA to co-chair and co-ordinate a presidents meeting with one of the presidents, both chosen by the presidents.
7. Make clear to IPA that the EPF President has not been elected as president of a regional association and has no mandate to speak for the presidents at IPA level, however convenient that may be.

I leave you with a reflection Gabriele Junkers (who has gone on to specialise in writing about psychoanalytic organizations (Junkers, 2023) communicated to me after reading an early draft of this paper.

“..the task of behaving democratically, as leader of a group that has passive tendencies, is complicated. One feels seduced to cut short (what can seem like) endless rumination by clearly saying: that is how it should be done. The work to be done is to spell out democracy in every tiny movement of the togetherness in the organization. It means to remember reality, especially time, aims once set etc. What we analysts often do not think of is the different quality of thinking: behind the couch and in a group/as a leader. The task is to differentiate/separate the inner setting in institutional work from the inner setting behind the couch (that does not have a proper ending). We need to remind us again and again how important it is to find courage to differentiate between these two styles of reflection, respecting contextuality. It is a work for all of us, to strive to make conscious that we have to learn it, every day anew.”

Her comments may help us to understand both why the executive has become so much more active over the years and why the way forward is through active participation in a work group by all of us. This is for the Council, assisted by the Executive, to facilitate.

Conclusion

This contribution has taken on the difficult and possibly unwelcome task of being frank about the need for our EPF to reverse its path, if it is to stay true to its original purpose and provide a forum for psychoanalysts in the different societies in Europe to discuss and then learn from each other how they do psychoanalysis and training and how and why they have developed differences – the scientific issues framed in the original purpose.

Taking the need for respect for each other and our views for granted, I have focused on the way institutional structure has gradually changed to the detriment of a focus on a scientific policy that is useful to societies. Policy continuity, trust and across society well-informed personal relationships, need to be at the heart of how our federation can be successful.

In other words, bluntly, I have argued that the current institutional direction we are taking is failing to provide the forum we need. But I am not arguing that the various institutional decisions that have led to this direction, marked by increasing autocracy, has been deliberate or malign.

The apparent tendency for the executive to become more dictatorial or the decision to change the structure and constitution are easily understood, even if the consequences I have summarized - an increasingly passive role for the society presidents and a reversal of core principles with which the EPF began – were not, at the time decisions were made.

My hope is that this argument will be considered with respect in a work group attitude and we will not waste time on recrimination. I also hope my comments will not be understood as ‘we did it better in the old days”. Rather, I have aimed to provoke discussion of the principles underlying our current direction and to suggest crucial questions for those now on the council to ask themselves. Among these:

• Do the Society presidents feel it is their Federation and they are in charge so that what is being discussed at meetings is useful to them and their members?
• Are our meetings sufficiently addressing the urgent questions about how far our practice and training remain informed by Freud's basic principles so that we understand in sufficient depth our differences enough to state them clearly and learn from each other’s strengths.
• Are we being enabled to take advantage of the potential of EPF to allow our European society members and training committees to learn from and gain support from each other?
• Do we feel EPF meetings are discussing the most important issues that concern presidents of societies which can help with issues with which they have to contend?
• Has the EPF conference organization become too restrictive and controlling of content and presenters?

I have made clear my view that we need to change direction. But all this is an old man’s view which the Council may or may not agree with.