1° European Conference, Couple and Family Section: “Families in transformation, a challenge for psychoanalytic psychotherapy”, Florenţa, 20-22 mai 2010

Location: Hotel Mediterraneo, Lungarno del Tempio, 44, Florence

Details: http://www.florencecongress2010.eu/ENG/index.html

Congress description

In our work, we are increasingly confronted with new family configurations: extended, reconstituted, blended family, single parent family, stepfamily, are some of the terms we use to describe and try to classify the sweeping transformation involving the family and the couple. In our clinical practice we meet homosexual couples, couples who had their children through artificial insemination, adoptive families, multi-ethnic families. How should we consider these new configurations? Are they just expressions of social change or do they affect the inner world of their members? Would the Oedipus complex take on new aspects and meanings? We feel that we need to rethink and reformulate our classical psychoanalytical concepts in order to integrate them with these modern social changes. And we believe the rapid transformation of the family-couple institution to be not only a challenge for psychoanalytic psychotherapy but also a great opportunity of learning for all of us…

The new section for Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Psychotherapy is the result of important and complex foundation work carried out from 1997 on Pierre Benghozi’s initiative and other colleagues of the EFPP such as Rudolf Balmer, Claude Bigot, Marion Bower, Lynne Cudmore, Peter Dott, Rosa Jaitin, Daniela Lucarelli, Jeanne Milligan, Peter Möhring, Anna Maria Nicolò, Gisela Zeller-Steinbrich . It took the project many years before being approved and passed by the general assembly of the EFPP delegates in Stockholm in 2005, then officially confirmed with the modification of the statutes of the EFPP at Kortenberg in 2009.

The focus on the couple and the family adds a new approach to the existing psychoanalytical models and widens the field for therapeutic action. For these reasons we believe it necessary to further develop research and clinical work in this area, where the intrapsychic and interpersonal dimensions coexist and influence each other in a permanent dialogue.

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