Psychoanalytic research and the IPA: history, present status and future potential

This paper traces the chequered history of formal psychoanalytic research within the century-long development of psychoanalysis as theory and practice. It describes the official involvement of the American Psychoanalytic Association in the support of psychoanalytic research since 1970, and of the International Psychoanalytical Association since the 1980s. In the IPA, this has consisted of the introduction at the 1987 Montreal Congress of two half-day panels on formal psychoanalytic research; in the creation in 1991 of an annual IPA Research Conference held in March at University College London; and then the creation in 1996 of an annual ten-day IPA Summer School for neophyte psychoanalytic researchers, also at UCL in London. The paper then details the inauguration by the IPA, at the 1997 IPA Congress in Barcelona, of a mechanism for funding psychoanalytic research the Research Advisory Board (RAB), and the overwhelming--and totally unanticipated--worldwide response to the initial call for proposals in the autumn of 1997. Implications of this for psychoanalysis as a discipline are sketched.