October 2022

COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE 

• Membership Communications sub-Committee – Chair, Luis Alejandro Nagy, USA
• External Communications sub-Committee – Chair, Chris Heath, USA
• Scientific Communications sub-Committee – Chair, Ursula Burkert, Germany
  
  

We believe that communication is the central axis of all institutional activity. We have strived to achieve better and more dynamic information for members and candidates, considering the public and colleagues not belonging to IPA institutions.

We have focused on combining monthly themes between webinars, podcasts, blogs, scientific articles and exchanges on social networks.  We want to keep this modality in 2023, but this time, we will be providing members and candidates with the opportunity to propose topics and speakers using a new call for proposals system.  We are interested in offering what is in demand, and giving members and candidates new ways to engage with our international community. 

We based ourselves on the objectives of the officers of the current administration. Therefore, we maintained an open look at the community and the conflictive social situations: we created, for example, a special page for the war in Ukraine. We continue to use the listserv to exchange experiences. Several communications were made on behalf of the IPA concerning the painful situations and the celebrations, and the congresses.

We implement short videos of less than a minute to broadcast, especially on Instagram. In 2022, the eight IPA webinars brought together 21 experts from different parts of the world, around a sensitive plan, for the psychoanalytic community and the public. The series of webinars was a careful balance of current events, emerging issues, and the scientific priorities that the communication committee has had for this year.

The response from the public has been good, reaching 5,581 persons in total. In geographical terms, webinars have an international appeal, reaching people from 74 countries of origin around the world. The United States (751), Brazil (443), and the United Kingdom (405) are the countries with the highest number of attendees. 2,388 IPA members have participated in the webinars, averaging 341 per session. Mariano Ruperthuz is the IPA Webinar Coordinator.

We have also released a total of 28 podcast episodes, reaching 53,263 listens for the new episodes, with a total of 88,127 listeners, including past episodes in the last 12 months. A rough estimate of total plays since the start of the Series is over 200k. Gaetano Pellegrini is the Talks On Psychoanalysis podcast Coordinator.

For the year 2023, we are thinking of opening small thematic and regional discussion groups where participants can sign up and function with a coordinator for a limited time. We will hold virtual group meetings based on a current scientific article, inviting its author and one or two discussants.

These will be held on Zoom, and the audience will be divided into small groups and finish the activity in plenary. We plan to open a bibliographic repository (Virtual Library) with full-text articles that we will incorporate into different languages.

In short, we are a great team of people with great enthusiasm and energy. With the conviction that the purpose of our committee is to spread psychoanalysis worldwide and provide the tools so that we can be in contact and communicate with activities that allow the deepening of knowledge of theory and practice, sharing experiences and concerns.

We want to hear from you, so we await your comments, suggestions, doubts, and questions by writing to: [email protected] 

Until next time!

Silvia Wajnbuch, Chair
IPA Communications Committee, Argentina

FROM THE CHAIRS OF OUR SUB-COMMITTEES

Scientific Communications sub-Committee

The IPA website is a central place for internal and external communications of the IPA. It provides information about activities and news, a list of individual members, societies, and training institutes, information about the basics of psychoanalysis, and its extensive archive it provides a database and, at the same time, is the institution’s memory.
To make it more user-friendly, we have reviewed the content and are in the process of giving it a new structure.

We hope it will help interested people from inside and outside to find their way through the sphere of IPA psychoanalysis. Another topic with which we are dealing is the recurring question of the tension between the wish to provide lively descriptions of what we are thinking and what we are doing and the necessity to avoid using clinical material in our presentations: how could we convey the essence of our work without violating the privacy of patients and analysts and the boundaries of the analytic situation? We hope to find answers.

Ursula Burkert, Chair, Germany

Membership Communications sub-Committee

Communication is not something that happens accidentally it takes work, organisation, and experience. Creating spaces for our members to interact and to let us know what they are doing is vital to forming bonds and relationships with like-minded people. We created the Committee of the Month space to showcase and give a voice to our committees by posting a short monthly presentation on our website, newsletter, and social media channels. We are trying to prioritise simplicity, empathy, and a sense of connection with the psychoanalytic community. We are also working on new programmes like designing an annual membership survey and a membership welcome package.  If you are interested in participating in any of these programmes, please contact us. 
We like to hear from you!

Luis Alejandro Nagy , Chair, USA

External Communications sub-Committee

We believe it is important to engage the general public by having communications that are engaging and understandable. Psychoanalysis brings a depth to life; how can we present that depth?

Through outward-facing media such as our social media channels, our blogs, our website, our podcasts, and our webinars, we engage topics that range from challenging to intriguing. Please find and follow us on all the major social media platforms for our most current material.

Chris Heath, Chair, USA