[1] In 1902 Sigmund Freud started to meet every week with colleagues to discuss his work, thus establishing the Psychological Wednesday Society.
By 1908 there were 14 regular members and some guests including Max Eitingon, Carl Jung, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones, all future Presidents of the IPA.
The IPA's aims include creating new psychoanalytic groups, conducting research, developing training policies and establishing links with other bodies.
Constituent Organisations "Study Groups" are bodies of analysts which have not yet developed sufficiently to be a freestanding society, but that is their aim.
[5] In 1999, Elisabeth Roudinesco noted that the IPA's attempts to professionalize psychoanalysis had become "a machine to manufacture significance".
She also said that in France, "Lacanian colleagues looked upon the IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism".