Psychotherapy Resources

To give some insight on how much psychoanalysis is practiced nowadays, a short overview of the world’s psychoanalytic organisations is given and some numbers are provided.

International Psychoanalytical Association(IPA)

The IPA is the world’s primary accrediting and regulatory body for psychoanalysis. Their mission is to assure the continued vigour and development of psychoanalysis for the benefit of psychoanalytic patients. It works in partnership with it’s 70 constituent organizations in 33 countries to support 11,500 members.7

Psychoanalytical associations in the USA

There are 77 psychoanalytical organizations, institutes associations in the United States, which are spread across the states of America. The American Psychoanalytical Association (APSaA) has 38 affiliated societies, which are comprised of ten or more active members who practice in a given geographical area.8

The aims of the APSaA and other psychoanalytical organizations are: provide ongoing educational opportunities for it’s members, stimulate the development and research of psychoanalysis, provide trainings to professionals and organize conferences and events.9 There are eight affiliated study groups in the USA (two of them are in Latin America).10 A study group is the first level of integration of a psychoanalytical body within the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), followed by a provisional society and finally a member society.11

Psychoanalytical organizations in Europe

The European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF) is the scientific organization that consolidates all European psychoanalytic societies. This organization is affiliated with the IPA. In 2002 there were approximately 3900 individual members in twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen different languages.12 There are also twenty-five psychoanalytic societies.

Freud observed that, at somewhat predictable points during early development, children’s behavior often orients around certain body parts (the mouth during breast-feeding, the anus during potty-training, and later the genitals). Believing, due to his previous work with hysterical patients, that adult neurosis often has root in childhood sexuality, Freud proposed that these behaviors were childhood expressions of sexual fantasy and desire. He suggested that humans are born “polymorphous perverse”, meaning that infants can derive sexual pleasure from any part of the body.[2], and that it is only though socialization that libidinal drives are focused into adult heterosexuality.

Due to the fairly predictable time-line that the childhood behaviors in question follow, Freud developed a rigid model for what he considered to be the “normal” sexual development of the child, which he called “libido development”. According to this theory, each child passes through five psychosexual stages. During each stage, the libido has a different erogenous zone as the source of its drives.

However, in the pursuit of satisfying these sexual urges, the child may experience failure or reprimand from their parents or society for their behaviors, and may thus come to associate anxiety with this erogenous zone. In order to avoid this anxiety, the child becomes preoccupied with themes related to this zone, a phenomenon Freud termed fixation. Freud believed the fixation persists into adulthood and underlies the personality structure and psychopathology, including neurosis, hysteria and personality disorders. Freud called this psychosexual infantilism.