History
The Committee was created in January 2017 to review “the ways in which confidentiality pertains to and impacts on the work of IPA psychoanalysts”, to draft documents on best practices for the IPA Board to review and approve, and to advise the Board on related issues for the 2019 Congress. In November 2018 it completed the
Report of the IPA Confidentiality Committee. This was approved by the IPA Board in January 2019, and is available in five languages on the Resources page. In July 2019 the Committee was made a permanent committee of the IPA.
With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the
Committee's original Mandate was replaced by a temporary one which prioritises the need for analysts to have contact with their analysands through remote working methods.
The temporary Mandate replaces the permanent one "until such time as the Executive Committee considers the current emergency is at an end and it is timely to revert to the original one." In April 2020 the Committee published brief advice on
Confidentiality and remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2021 a revised version was published as
Confidentiality and Remote Psychoanalytic Work , together with a document on
Confidentiality in the Administration of Psychoanalytic Practices Using the Internet.
Other activities of the Committee between 2017 and 2021 include: a webinar on 'Confidentiality' (June 2019); two Panels at the IPA London Congress (July 2019); presentations by Committee Members to the Uruguayan and Canadian Psychoanalytic Societies; presentation by the Committee Chair in panel at the 2021 APsaA winter meeting; advising the Programme Committee for the IPA 2021 Congress regarding confidentiality of its proceedings, and preparation of a panel for the Congress jointly with the IPA Ethics Committee. Further details and links are on the
Resources page.
A new membership of the Confidentiality Committee was formed in 2021. Initially, the committee embarked on a number of information-gathering projects, soliciting input from journal editors, conference planners, and institute directors/ directors of training about the way in which our committee can promote attention to issues surrounding confidentiality. In the summer of 2023, we presented jointly with the Ethics committee at the IPA conference in Cartagena . Our panel was entitled, “Ethics and Confidentiality in Times of Crisis. We met with the TF2 Committee in the spring pf 2023 and contributed a short
document (
Report on Confidentiality for the Task Force on Psychoanalytic Training in Contemporary Times) to their report to the IPA Board. In January, we launched a quarterly email to all IPA members to raise awareness of reports written by this committee, and more broadly, to heighten awareness of risks to confidentiality in present-day training and practice. Presently, we are working on drafting “Best Practices” guidelines on confidentiality for a range of recipients, including best practices for conference planners, for journal editors, for institute directors and directors of therapy, and for IPA members at large.
Current members of the Committee are:
Sarah Ackerman (Chair);
Gustavo Jarast (Member for Latin America);
Susan Kattlove (Member for North America);
Giorgio Mattana (Member for Europe);
Klaus Poppensieker (Ex-Officio: Chair, Ethics Committee);
Adriana Prengler (Ex-Officio: Vice-President);
John Churcher (Consultant);
Paul Crake (Ex-Officio: Chief Executive).