Welcome to the website of the Institute of Psychoanalysis & British Psychoanalytical Society

The London Psychoanalytical Society was founded by Ernest Jones on 30th October 1913. With the expansion of psychoanalysis in the United Kingdom the Society was renamed the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. Soon after, the Institute of Psychoanalysis was established to administer the Society’s activities. These include: the training of psychoanalysts, the development of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, the provision of treatment through The London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, the publication of books and journals, maintaining a library, furthering research, and holding public lectures. The Society has a Code of Ethics and an Ethical Committee. The Society, the Institute and the Clinic are all located at Byron House.

The Society is a component of the International Psychoanalytical Association, a body with members on all five continents that safeguards professional and ethical practice. The Society is a member of the British Confederation of Psychotherapists; the BCP publishes a register of British psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical psychotherapists. All members of the British Psychoanalytical Society are required to undertake continuing professional development.

Through its work – and the work of its individual members – the British Psychoanalytical Society has made an unrivalled contribution the understanding and treatment of mental illness. Members of the Society have included Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, John Bowlby, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Joseph Sandler, and Donald Winnicott.

What is Psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis is the most intensive form of the talking therapy, devised by Sigmund Freud one hundred years ago, but developed continuously and radically since then. Patients attend five fifty minute sessions weekly, usually for several years, working with their psychoanalyst to examine and to explore unconscious conflicts of feeling, emotion and phantasy that are at the root of their symptoms and the problems that are troubling them.

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that it is by no means only genetic and constitutional factors that make up the personality. Other central influences include the experience of birth, of the early relationships with parents, of sexuality, of love and hate, of loss and death. These crucial experiences, worked over and lived out in the core relationships of the family, lay down patterns in the mind of feeling, phantasy and relationship - patterns which provide unconscious templates, or models of relationships. Such unconscious versions of relationships are often at the root of the problems which lead people to seek help.

The regular sessions of psychoanalysis provide a setting within which these unconscious patterns can be brought into awareness and worked on with a view to change. The relationship with the analyst is influenced inevitably and powerfully by the patient’s unconscious ways of behaving and itself becomes a central area of study, enabling light to be thrown on the patient’s patterns of relationship in the immediacy of the sessions.

The work of psychoanalysis is long and arduous, for both patient and analyst. When successful, however, psychoanalysis can be a unique and profound experience that often leads to long-term development in close relationships, work and creativity. Success depends on both analyst and patient and on the quality of their joint work.

Mission Statement

We aim to develop our position as the leading centre of excellence in the UK in the provision of psychoanalytic training, education, publication and clinical practice and to develop a professional organisation for the furthering of psychoanalysis through diversity and debate.

Aims

1. To support the development of psychoanalytical knowledge as a general theory of mind.

2. To maintain and further the clinical and scientific standards of psychoanalysis.

3. To promote an internal culture where a diversity of psychoanalytic theories and techniques are valued and can be debated with intellectual openness.

4. To train high quality psychoanalytic professionals in sufficient numbers to maintain and develop the profession of psychoanalysis.

5. To provide and/or support high quality psychoanalytic treatment.

6. To disseminate knowledge about psychoanalysis, to health and allied
professionals.

7. To promote the contribution of the discipline of psychoanalysis to
public and intellectual life .

8. To form mutually collaborative clinical and academic links with other organisations (public sector, academic and charitable) which support the furtherance of the above aims.

9. To work as appropriate with and/or within national and international organisations in the interests of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic profession.

10. To maintain the physical and administrative facilities necessary for the above activities to take place in an appropriate and professional environment.


WHO WE ARE

The Society currently has 447 members and 43 students. Many psychoanalysts live in or near London but a significant number practice in other parts of the British Isles and abroad. Members of the Society come from a diversity of countries and cultures, offering treatment in over 22 languages, including Armenian, Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Iranian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. Today as in the past, approximately half of the British Psychoanalytical Society are women. A complete list of qualified UK  Institute trained psychoanalysts is available here www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/uklist.htm 

THE QUALIFICATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSTS

Members of the public considering psychoanalysis may want to consult this list to make sure that a practitioner describing themselves as a psychoanalyst is in fact qualified genuinely to practise this intensive form of treatment. Those named are properly entitled to hold themselves out to the public as psychoanalysts because of their Internationally recognised training.
The Institute of Psychoanalysis qualifies its members to belong to the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) - a body with members on all five continents which safeguards professional standards and oversees the stages by which new societies are created.

Since the term Psychoanalyst is currently not yet protected in law anyone can, at present, claim to be a psychoanalyst.

If you have any doubts that a particular individual is qualified to represent themselves as a qualified psychoanalyst you may wish to consult the comprehensive listing of all qualified practising Institute trained psychoanalysts working currently in the UK.

List of Members of the British Psychoanalytical Society¹

A listing, with contact details, of all currently practising members of the British Psychoanalytical Society who have fulfilled the British Psychoanalytic Council's CPD requirements. (For details about this regulatory body see the website of the British Psychoanalytic Council [BPC])

Practising UK Psychoanalysts

1 The Institute lists exclude the names of those psychoanalysts trained by other organisations whose training and clinical experience is recognised formally by the IPA under their stringent equivalency procedures. To ascertain whether a particular individual not included in our list is a qualified psychoanalyst you should contact the professional organisation to which that individual belongs, or the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).

A searchable listing of qualified and practising psychoanalysts, in particular areas of the UK, as well as psychoanalytical psychotherapists, can be found at the BPC Website from  here

Editorial Policy

 The primary purpose of our website is that of providing a medium for the open communication and exchange of information about psychoanalysis and the clinical and theoretical contributions of the British Psychoanalytical Society in particular. In doing this we intend to convey and uphold the distinctive values and ethics of psychoanalysis, including the essential privacy and confidentiality of patients, without which authentic psychoanalysis could not take place.