ABSTRACT
I was elected President of the International Psychoanalytical Association on July 31, 1985, and the next day, as my first official act, I presided over a joint meeting of the outgoing and incoming IPA Executive Councils. Customarily, this is a ceremonial and social meeting marking the biannual “changing of the guard.” On this occasion it was, however, a serious discussion about the lawsuit and the IPA’s position in relation to it. Moses Laufer voiced the common European view that the IPA was in a lawsuit only because of the actions of the American, with which most Europeans were totally out of sympathy, and expressed concern for the potential divisiveness of these perceptions within the IPA. Several people, in a variation on this theme, felt it important that there be significant European input into the IPA decision-making process, in order to keep the matter from being seen as a wholly American issue, or one in which the American’s position would be perceived as having primacy within the counsels of the IPA. In line with this, it was decided that the main direction of the legal representation on behalf of the IPA would be centered in the London attorneys, with their American legal associates guided and constrained by this European oversight. It was also decided, however, not to attempt to move the Treasury out of the United States; this would be “morally indefensible.” One weakness in the defendants’ position was pointed out. There was a clause in the IPA Bylaws that if an American sought psychoanalytic training in an IPA Institute outside the United States, clearance should be requested from the American (part of the price of the post-World War II reconciliation of the American with the IPA), and this could be seized upon by the plaintiffs as evidence of the restraint of trade intentions of the American. Though it was stated that such permission was always granted when requested, the requirement was nonetheless there, and I have already presented the documentation of Luborsky’s experience in the late 1940s when Flugel tried to obtain permission to analyze him under the auspices of the London Institute, and Bowlby, then Secretary of the Training Committee, wrote back rejecting the application on the ground that “it would raise great difficulties were we to undertake to train non-medicals from the States.”
