IAAP
International Association for Analytical Psychology
Publications & Resources
The global institutional body of Jungian analysis — its history, publications, the ARAS archive, and what it means for the living practice of depth psychology worldwide
What the IAAP Is — and Why It Matters
If the Journal of Analytical Psychology is where Jungian research is published, the International Association for Analytical Psychology is the living institutional body through which that research is created, debated, disseminated, and applied to clinical practice around the world. Founded in 1955 — the same year the journal launched — the IAAP is the global governing body of Jungian analytical psychology: setting training standards, recognizing member societies, supporting outreach and research, and bringing the worldwide community of analysts together in triennial congress.
Understanding the IAAP matters for anyone who wants to understand what Jungian analysis actually is as a clinical practice rather than simply a body of ideas. Jung's psychology did not remain a fixed theoretical system after his death in 1961. It has been continuously developed, debated, and applied by thousands of clinically trained analysts working in radically different cultural contexts — from Latin America to East Asia, from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa. The IAAP is the institutional framework within which that living development occurs.
IAAP — Institutional Profile
Founded: 1955 by a group of Jungian analysts to sustain and promote the work of C.G. Jung. Jung himself was the first Honorary President.
Headquarters: Zurich, Switzerland — the city where Jung spent most of his working life and where the C.G. Jung Institute continues to operate as the primary international training center.
Membership: 81 Group Member societies recognized worldwide, with approximately 4,000 trained analysts. Membership requires completion of training programs meeting IAAP-established standards — typically involving personal analysis, theoretical study, and supervised clinical work over a minimum of four to five years.
Global reach: Member societies operate on every continent. Since the late 1990s the IAAP has provided training through a Router program — structured training pathways for analysts in regions where no established local training exists — meaning IAAP-qualified analysts now practice in countries and regions where none previously existed.
Primary purposes: Disseminating knowledge of analytical psychology; holding international congresses; supporting research; maintaining training standards; and providing outreach in response to collective trauma, natural disaster, and social crisis.
University partnerships: The IAAP has actively pursued joint conferences with universities in recent years — reflecting a deliberate strategic priority of connecting the Jungian clinical tradition to the scientific research world, including the empirical dream research described elsewhere in this series.
The Triennial International Congress — The Living Heart of the IAAP
Every three years, the global Jungian community gathers for the International Congress of Analytical Psychology — a multi-day event bringing together analysts, candidates, researchers, and scholars from every member society worldwide to present papers, debate theoretical developments, and engage with the full breadth of contemporary Jungian thinking. The congress is the single most important gathering in the international Jungian calendar.
XXIII International Congress — Zurich, August 24–29, 2025
The 2025 congress in Zurich was the most significant in the IAAP's seventy-year history — held in Jung's home city on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Over 1,800 participants from every continent attended the Kongresshaus Zürich, making it the largest gathering of analytical psychologists ever convened.
The congress theme — "Experiences of the Non-Understandable: Jungian Explorations and Contributions" — reflected the moment: one hundred and fifty years after Jung's birth, the community was asking simultaneously where the tradition has come from, where it stands today, and where it needs to go. Reflections on theory, clinical practice, values, ethics, research, training, and cultural awareness ran through all five days of proceedings.
Papers addressed the full range of current Jungian scholarship: developments in empirical research on Jungian concepts; the application of analytical psychology to collective trauma and cultural crisis; the relationship between depth psychology and neuroscience; clinical innovations in analytic technique; and archetypal perspectives on contemporary geopolitical and ecological challenges.
All congress papers were provided in simultaneous translation — reflecting the genuinely international character of the gathering. The next congress is scheduled for Rome, August 27 – September 1, 2028, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica.
IAAP Publications and Dissemination Resources
Beyond the Journal of Analytical Psychology — which it supports but does not directly publish — the IAAP maintains several important publications and public resources that make Jungian scholarship accessible to analysts, students, and the general public.
IAAP News Bulletin
A monthly email newsletter keeping the global analyst community informed of developments, conferences, interviews with leading figures, and IAAP institutional news. Free subscription available to anyone through the IAAP website. The bulletin regularly features in-depth interviews with prominent analysts and profiles of IAAP members doing significant work.
Abstracts of Jung's Collected Works
Commissioned by the National Institute of Mental Health and originally published in 1978, edited by Carrie Lee Rothgeb and Siegfried M. Clemens. The full text of these abstracts — covering all 20 volumes of Jung's Collected Works — is freely available in the public domain through the IAAP website. An invaluable reference tool for anyone working with Jung's primary texts.
Congress Proceedings
Papers presented at IAAP International Congresses are typically collected and published following each gathering, making the cutting edge of Jungian clinical and theoretical scholarship available to those who could not attend in person. Selected congress presentations are also made available as video recordings through the IAAP's online resources.
Jungian.Directory Journal Catalogue
The IAAP is supporting an initiative by Jungian.Directory to build a searchable catalogue of articles published across close to 45 Jungian and Jungian-related journals worldwide. When complete, this catalogue will represent the most comprehensive index of Jungian scholarship ever assembled — a single searchable resource covering the full breadth of analytical psychology's published literature.
The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism — ARAS
ARAS — An Extraordinary Resource for Dream and Symbol Research
Among the resources the IAAP promotes and supports, none is more distinctive or more directly relevant to dream interpretation than the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) — an encyclopedic collection of archetypal images that has no parallel anywhere in the world.
ARAS began in the 1930s at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland — the legendary annual gatherings that brought Jung together with scholars including Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Kerényi, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. A photographic archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from around the world was assembled there and subsequently developed into what became ARAS. Physical collections are housed at the C.G. Jung Institute in New York, with mirror collections at the San Francisco and Los Angeles Jung Institutes.
The archive now contains more than 17,000 photographic images spanning the full range of human history — from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras through ancient India, Egypt, Mycenae, Asia Minor, and small tribal societies to major empires and contemporary art. Each image is individually cross-indexed and accompanied by scholarly commentary that includes a cultural history placing it in its historical and geographical context, an archetypal commentary bringing it into focus for its psychological and symbolic meaning, a bibliography of related reading, and a glossary of technical terms.
For anyone working with dreams, ARAS represents something genuinely rare: a systematic, scholarly index of the visual vocabulary of the collective unconscious — the images that appear across cultures and centuries because they arise from the same deep structure of human experience. When a dream produces an image that feels charged with significance beyond its personal context, ARAS provides the research tool for exploring what that image has meant across the full scope of human symbolic history.
ARAS is available online at aras.org. A subscription is required for full archive access, though substantial free resources — including a Concordance of Jung's Collected Works searchable by word or topic, and a quarterly online journal connecting art, culture, and depth psychology — are available without charge. The IAAP has provided IAAP and IAJS members with trial access periods, and the archive is used by scholars, artists, therapists, and individual dreamers worldwide.
IAAP Training Standards — What It Means to Be a Jungian Analyst
One of the IAAP's most important functions is establishing and maintaining the training standards that define what it means to call oneself a Jungian analyst — a question that has significant implications for the clinical quality and consistency of Jungian practice worldwide.
What IAAP Training Requires
Personal analysis: A substantial course of personal Jungian analysis — typically a minimum of 200+ hours over several years. This is considered foundational: the analyst must have their own sustained encounter with the unconscious before guiding others through that territory.
Theoretical study: Comprehensive study of Jungian theory across the full range of analytical psychology — the structure of the psyche, archetypes, complexes, individuation, dream theory, active imagination, developmental psychology, and the relationship between analytical psychology and other depth psychological traditions.
Supervised clinical work: Sustained supervised clinical practice with patients, with ongoing case consultation and review by experienced analysts.
Duration: Training typically requires a minimum of four to five years and often extends considerably longer, depending on the candidate's starting point and the requirements of their member society.
The Router program: For candidates in regions where no established local training exists, the IAAP provides structured training pathways — the Router program — through which IAAP-qualified analysts now practice in countries and cultural contexts that previously had no access to formally trained Jungian clinicians. This global expansion of the Jungian clinical tradition is one of the IAAP's most significant institutional achievements of the past three decades.
IAAP Outreach — Analytical Psychology in Crisis Contexts
The IAAP's mission extends beyond clinical training and academic publication into direct humanitarian engagement. Through its Outreach program, the IAAP supports projects by Jungian analysts, candidates, and trainees responding to victims of natural disasters, pandemics, conflict, poverty, and oppression — applying the insights of depth psychology in community crisis contexts rather than only in the consulting room.
This outreach work reflects something important about how the IAAP understands Jung's project. Analytical psychology was never intended to be a psychology only for the economically privileged who could afford individual analysis. The archetypal dimensions of human experience — the universal patterns of loss, transformation, shadow, and renewal — are present in every human life and every human community. The IAAP's outreach work represents an institutional commitment to making depth psychological understanding available in contexts where it is most urgently needed.
The 2025 Congress Theme — "Experiences of the Non-Understandable"
The theme chosen for the 150th anniversary congress — Experiences of the Non-Understandable: Jungian Explorations and Contributions — deserves attention as a statement of where analytical psychology understands itself to stand at this moment in history.
The "non-understandable" is not simply an acknowledgment of mystery for its own sake. It is a precise psychological concept: the dimension of experience that exceeds the capacity of the rational ego to comprehend, categorize, and control — what Jung called the numinous, what the alchemists called the mysterium, what every major religious tradition has attempted to name and approach. It includes the experience of depth in a dream that feels more real than waking life, the encounter with an archetypal image that carries weight and meaning beyond anything the personal life can explain, and the recurring symptom or pattern that seems to have a life of its own independent of conscious intention.
That the global Jungian community chose this theme for Jung's 150th anniversary — rather than a celebratory retrospective or a triumphalist claim about what depth psychology has achieved — suggests a mature relationship with the tradition's limits alongside its insights. The non-understandable is not a problem to be solved. It is the domain in which depth psychology works.
What the IAAP Means for the Living Tradition
Jung died in 1961. The ideas he developed across a remarkable sixty-year career of clinical work, writing, and self-exploration did not die with him — but they could have calcified into a fixed orthodoxy, applied mechanically by analysts trained to replicate a method rather than embody a spirit of inquiry. The IAAP's existence, and the global community it sustains, has largely prevented this from happening.
The 4,000 analysts working under IAAP standards today are not simply transmitting Jung's ideas. They are applying them, questioning them, extending them into cultural contexts Jung never encountered, testing them against findings from neuroscience and empirical research, and bringing them to bear on forms of human suffering that the twentieth century could not have anticipated. The congress theme of the non-understandable is itself a Jungian gesture: humility before the complexity of the psyche, openness to what cannot yet be categorized, and sustained attention to what the evidence actually shows rather than what the theory predicts.
For anyone who works with dreams — whether as an analyst, a therapist, or simply someone who takes their own dream life seriously — the IAAP matters because it is the institutional guarantee that the tradition remains alive and developing rather than becoming a museum of mid-twentieth-century ideas. The research published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, the clinical work presented at the triennial congress, the symbolic resources of the ARAS archive, and the training standards maintained across 81 member societies worldwide all serve the same ultimate purpose: keeping the encounter between the conscious mind and the unconscious depth both rigorous and genuinely open — which is precisely the condition that makes that encounter productive.
Jung wrote in 1934 that the psyche "is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the sine qua non of the world as an object." The IAAP exists to ensure that this wonder continues to be taken seriously — with the full weight of clinical discipline, scholarly rigor, and personal encounter that serious attention to the psyche requires.
Primary Sources & Further Reading
IAAP official website: iaap.org
XXIII Congress 2025: iaap.org/xxiii-international-congress
Abstracts of Jung's Collected Works (free, public domain): Available via iaap.org — search "Collected Works Abstracts"
ARAS — Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism: aras.org — includes free Concordance of Jung's Collected Works and free quarterly journal
Jungian.Directory Journal Catalogue: jungian.directory — searchable index of articles across ~45 Jungian journals
IAAP Journal links (all Jungian journals): iaap.org/resources/links-to-journals/
Next Congress — Rome 2028: August 27 – September 1, 2028, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome
Jung's own words: Jung, C.G. (1934). "The Soul and Death." In Collected Works, Vol. 8. Princeton University Press.
Related Pages on Power of Dreams:
Journal of Analytical Psychology |
Jungian Dream Psychology |
Jungian Psychology Guide |
Jung's 4 Major Archetypes |
Who Is Carl Jung?
