The Association seeks to provide as complete an understanding of psychoanalysis and its founder, including (1) the history of the discovery of psychoanalysis,;(2) the biography of Freud, his relatives, his disciples and psychoanalysts who have succeeded; (3) the history of the psychoanalytic movement since its origin, including international developments through its major divisions or branches; (4) the place of psychoanalysis in the history of science and ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and (5) the relationship of psychoanalysis with the general history and the political, socio-economic and cultural conditions of the time.

Joyce McDougall is a brilliant psychoanalytic clinician and educator whose many books have found widespread reception because of her elegant linkage of French psychoanalysis with the British and American tradition as well as her creative application of psychoanalytic theory to the understanding of patients with psychosomatic illness and perversion.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis was born in 1924 in Paris. A student of Jean Paul Sartre, he collaborated on the review Les Temps Modernes (1946-1948).

Riccardo Steiner was born and educated in Italy before moving to England in the 1970s to do his training in psychoanalysis.