Dear Members,

We are coming to the end of another year. I just received my renewal notification letter, and I hope you will be joining along with me for another year of membership, colloquia, webinars, conferences, and all the other ways that we find we can connect with each other through IARPP.

As our lives in so many parts of the world have been overwhelming, difficult, frightening, painful, and traumatic, we hope that our ways of being in touch with one another lend some measure of normalcy and mutual care in the midst of all that is so very far from normal and leaves us feeling isolated.

Even with so much occupying our minds, our membership continues to grow, as it has since we first came together in 2001. We are now over 2200 members from 51 different countries. This year has brought members from China, Hong Kong, Panama, Serbia, and Sweden to our group, which has already included members from India, Georgia, Iran, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Turkey, Israel, and Puerto Rico, to name just a few.

It is wonderful to know that there are now so many therapists from all over the world who have come together in IARPP to share their interests in relational ways of thinking and working. In these most difficult of times, our colloquia and webinars continue to thrive, with scores of posts and hundreds of us participating. The Collective listserv has been active, with over 500 people in touch with each other regularly via e-mail. Our May Colloquium with Francisco González (USA) on the collective of the individual enjoyed wide attendance and active participation. We had a webinar in Spanish, “The Goodness in Female Subjectivity: Implications for Treatment and Sexuality,” by Concepció Garriga Setó (Spain), and I enjoyed discussing my work on the dialogue of unconsciouses and the frame, in the Candidates’ Webinar this past year.

Offering our conference plenaries to a remote audience of members unable to travel to our conferences, an innovation that arose as a way to continue to connect with each other as best we could during the pandemic, has lent an addition to our capabilities that many of our members have appreciated and made use of. At last year’s conference in Valencia, we saw over 380 people in person, and 185 others joined us online for plenaries. It was a wonderful conference, in person or on video, and we are now looking forward to what we think will be another rich and meaningful conference in Merida, Mexico, in June. Planning for the conference is in full gear and looks to be another memorable IARPP experience. I hope I will get to see many of you there. But first, please join us in membership again this year and, if you can, let others in your communities know that IARPP may be an enriching addition to their professional and personal lives. See you soon.

Tony Bass, Membership Committee Chair

Anthony Bass, Ph.D.
New York, NY
Email Anthony Bass