CONFEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETIES
INTERIM PRESIDENT'S REPORT

Greetings!

In recent months, the CIPS board has been developing plans for a variety of exciting and challenging projects, projects that will significantly advance our organizational mission. Among these projects are the promotion of the FIPA credential as a marketing tool, promotion of the NAPSAC "Find-an-Analyst" website, a variety of legislative initiatives, expansion of our teleconference study groups, a CIPS-wide research project, and publication of a CIPS book series to feature the work of our societies and members. The feasibility and success of these projects will depend on the support and involvement of our membership

In talking to our society boards and to our individual members, we on the CIPS board find that the work of CIPS is largely unknown. In talking to leaders of other national associations, I have discovered that this is a problem endemic to national professional groups. The work of national groups is conducted at a distance from the daily work of local professional societies and often has only an indirect, and often unrecognized, value for individual members. This is probably unavoidable to some extent. However, we on the CIPS board have come to think that we need to work harder to bridge this gap. In addition to the E-Newsletter and the website, which contain a great deal of information, we have come to think that it would be helpful for the president to provide our members with periodic short reports on specific important matters.

This letter is the first of these short and focused reports that I will be sending out from time to time. In this letter, I want to report to you about the FIPA and the distribution of FIPA certificates.

The IPA will be sending all our members their FIPA this month. My core message to our members is this: We need to use the FIPA for it to have value.

I know that many of our members are already familiar with the FIPA and many are already using the FIPA designation in professional representations. Some of our members, however, may not know what the FIPA is or what it is for.

In short, the FIPA is the "Fellow of the IPA" credential. The FIPA certificate is the certificate stating that an IPA member is a "Fellow of the IPA."

Here is a short history of the FIPA and why we promoted it.

About five years ago, the CIPS Public Policy Committee, working with an analogous committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, conceived of the "Fellow of the IPA" credential. The intent of the FIPA plan was twofold: (a) to enable the public to identify qualified IPA-trained psychoanalysts and thus to differentiate between IPA-trained psychoanalysts and other practitioners, and (b) to help promote public awareness of the IPA as the world's primary accrediting and regulatory body for psychoanalysis, with the world's highest standards for psychoanalytic training and certification. It was our belief that the FIPA would help the public find qualified psychoanalytic help, and at the same time, benefit us all, both as a profession and as individual practitioners.

Jim Gooch (our representative on the IPA board at that time) and I presented the FIPA plan to the IPA board in New Orleans in March 2003. After a heated discussion, the plan was approved and the FIPA credential was formally implemented for North America at the end of that year. (The FIPA is only for North American members - comparable credentials will be developed for Europe and Latin America, respectively, should those regions request them.)

The IPA is now ready to issue formal certificates to all qualified IPA graduates practicing in North America. Unfortunately, despite our efforts to secure universal distribution in North America, the IPA is limiting distribution to those members who go online to request their FIPA certificates and agree to pay a small fee for production and mailing.

Bonnie Engdahl (CIPS Secretary) and I, along with the CIPS board, strongly believe that the distribution of the FIPA certificates is very important. We place great value on the FIPA as an instrument of collective public education, and hope that everyone will use the FIPA whenever possible.

The CIPS board has arranged for the distribution of FIPA certificates to all our full members (i.e., graduate analysts, including recent graduates) at no cost to individual members. We will continue to procure FIPA certificates for our new members and for candidates when they graduate training and become full members of CIPS.

Please Use Your FIPA!

The CIPS board encourages all our members to please use the FIPA credential. Please hang it in your offices, and most important, use the letters "F.I.P.A." after your name in all professional representations (e.g., bills, business cards, stationery). The board also wishes to encourage each of our societies to use the FIPA designation in their membership rosters, in their bulletins, and on their websites.

Please remember that the FIPA is not only for your personal benefit, but part of a larger strategic effort to make ourselves, the IPA analysts of North America, known to the public. The more you use the FIPA, the more recognizable it will become, and the more value it will have. This will benefit all of us, not only in our practices, but in our public information projects, our legislative initiatives, and our political efforts to protect psychoanalysis.

In closing, I would like to remind you about the coming NAPSAC "Find-an-Analyst" site. This NAPSAC "Find-an-Analyst" is a sister project to the FIPA project, and will help us promote the FIPA in North America. I will discuss this further in a future letter. In the meantime, please be sure to read about this important initiative on the home page of the CIPS website at www.cipsusa.org.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the FIPA, the NAPSAC "Find-an-Analyst" project, or about CIPS.

Best holiday wishes to all fellow Fellows of the IPA, both present and future!

Rick

Fredric T. Perlman, Ph.D., F.I.P.A.
300 Mercer Street, Apt 3L
New York, N.Y. 10003
(212) 505-7751
email: ftperlman@cipsusa.org