Open letter from the President to the members of the IACFP

In the social and cultural circumstances of the contemporary world, the social and political role of the IACFP becomes fundamental when we consider the fragmentation of the symbolic space, built by the culture of individualism and private happiness, which have marked the processes of subjectivation. The pandemic has deepened the abyss of social and economic inequalities, showing the fragility of social bonds and the limits of political systems. Exclusion, as a product of the processes of political domination, expresses the dimensions of material and psychic precariousness in which we live, by accentuating the psychic suffering of the subjects in the bonds of filiation and affiliation, in families, in couples, in institutions. This social violence, which is manifested by an ideological functioning and, which is not rare, by tyrannical bonds, attacks the human dimension which allows the subjects, in their singularity, to recognize themselves as part of a collective.

It is the task of the IACFP, guaranteed by the coherence of its research and the breadth of its reflections, to open up a path of subjective appropriation by preventing the dynamics of knowledge transmission from being invaded by the brakes of reproduction and alienation, by the paralysis of the movement of transformation. In the construction of its trajectory as an international association, the IACFP has recognized the multiplicity of political actions and programs of clinical and institutional action aimed at care practices with couples and families, in the public and private sphere.

It is fundamental for its development and expansion that these actions be consolidated. It is also the challenge of a field of research on clinics and their psychoanalytical foundations, open to different epistemologies. Our objective is to reach a clinical understanding of the complex modalities of family and conjugal organization in the contemporaneity of the different socio-cultural contexts.

With kind regards
Professor Maria Inês Assumpção Fernandes