Description
The International Forum of Psychoanalysis (IFP) was founded in 1991 by a committee of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) chaired by the Stockholm colleague Jan Stensson.
The IFPS had been founded in Amsterdam in the summer of 1962 by the joint initiative of : the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), the New York W.A. White Institute, the Mexican Group chaired by Erich Fromm (1900-1980) and the Austrian Arbeitskreise fuer Tiefenpsychologie chaired by Igor Caruso (1914-1981).
All these groups were interested in the creation of an international network through which their members could cultivate the scientific and professional exchanges that are necessary for us to function well and increase our competence as psychoanalysts.
The DPG had lost its membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1949, and the White Institute (founded by H.S. Sullivan, E. Fromm, F. Fromm-Reichmann in 1943) had never been recognized by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and by the IPA.
After holding a whole series of regular congresses (named IFPS Fora), whose proceedings were published by a whole series of different journals, a consensus was gradually reached about the necessity of creating an IFPS journal.
After such a decision was eventually taken in Stockholm, during the IFPS Conference “Male and female themes in psychoanalysis” organized in August 1991 by the Swedish Society for Holistic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, volume 1 of IFP came out in 1992. Scandinavian University Press was the publisher and Jan Stenson its editor-in-chief.
Since its beginning, a peer-reviewed journal, a Managing Editor (Mona Serenius) coordinated the work of the Editorial Board, consisting in a group of Regional Editors and in a larger group of Editorial Readers. From the very beginning, Christopher Bollas collaborated with IFP as a Consultant Editor and Christer Sjödin as Regional Editor for Northern Europe.
In 2000 Taylor and Francis followed Scandinavian University Press as publisher of IFP and in 2004 IFPS was able to have IFP become one of the first journals to be available through the PEP-disk.
Starting with Issue No.1/1999 Christer Sjödin became a coeditor-in-chief of IFP together with Jan Stensson. They worked together till Issue No.3/2004. After having edited the journal alone for 3 years, with Issue No.3/2007 Marco Conci joined Christer Sjödin as a coeditor-in-chief.
Between 1992 and 2012 the Editorial Board of IFP produced 21 volumes of the journal, for a total of 84 issues – IFP is a quarterly journal. The journal is published online at http://www.tandfonline.com/spsy, and the electronic version reaches over 1,600 libraries worldwide. The increasing readership resulted in 8,600 full text article downloads in 2012, an increase of 35% compared to the year before. The journal also reaches another 8,000 libraries through third party agreements such as EBSCOhost.
Since the IFPS Athens Forum of October 2010, all members of IFPS have the right to the online subscription of IFP which includes the possibility of downloading any paper published in anyone of the volumes produced.
The access to IFP for IFPS members takes place through the webpage of IFP, www.ifps-online.com
[Note: This information was put together by Marco Conci, Christer Sjödin, and Sofie Wennström, the Manging Editor of IFP.]