Dear Members,
In this most difficult of times for so many of us around the world, we feel fortunate to have the IARPP community as a kind of port in a battering storm.
Our rich and generative community is approaching its 20th birthday. The first full year of IARPP’s existence (2002), we had 160 members from 12 countries. In our first 19 years, our international participation has quadrupled to 48 countries. Our membership is 13 times greater than that of our first year: it is exhilarating to be one of 2,181 members from around the world, including colleagues from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Venezuela, Turkey, Russian Federation, Ukraine and many more. What a community of therapists from around the world to get to know and to learn from.
The IARPP community grows in large measure due to the generous efforts of volunteers among us who bring educational and professional growth opportunities to our members and beyond
In recent years we’ve been able to offer translations of many of the readings included in our events in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hebrew and Russian, thanks to the painstaking work of our multilingual members, and we have been able to conduct events in Spanish and Italian, also as a result of the full, loving engagement of our international and multilingual community.
We have continued our webinar series (email-based discussion forums open to 75 participants) and our online colloquia for all our members, and we have added Zoom-based symposiums to what we have been able to offer during these last two pandemic years. Our first symposium was in January 2021 and most recently, still under the shadow of Covid, we hosted a second Zoom-based symposium in October.
Three hundred and twenty individuals attended this event in real time, from twenty different countries. We heard 15 presenters representing experiences from Chile, Greece, Israel, Italy, Peru, South Africa, Spain, United Kingdom and USA.
IARPP local chapters — of which we have 14 — are also great sources of support and engagement in our community, with events held in their members’ neck of the woods. You can read about IARPP chapters’ activities in the dozen reports contained in this bulletin.
It has been especially exciting to see IARPP roots taking hold in countries where psychology and psychoanalysis is not as historically rooted in their local cultures. Small groups of IARPP members have been springing up in Venezuela, Taiwan, Slovenia, Singapore, Poland, Panama, Netherlands, Malta, Lithuania, Republic of Korea, Hungary, Finland, Croatia, Colombia, China, Ireland, Iran, Ukraine, Norway, France, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Austria. We are looking forward to welcoming more members from these countries, and from new countries around the world where relational thought is becoming of interest.
We are happy to report as well that we have expanded our ability to offer Continuing Education Credits. Thanks to the work of Lucia Lezama Tannenbaum, our Symposium and Colloquium all carry CE credits. And special thanks, of course, to Valerie Ghent and Elisa Zazzera, who make all of this possible. Everyone present at our last symposium saw with their own eyes how instrumental Elisa was in so gracefully and skillfully managing an event which was so enriching to us all.
We are looking forward to seeing you in Los Angeles in June.
Tony Bass
Membership Committee Chair
Tony Bass, Ph.D.
New York, NY USA
Email Tony Bass