The TFP Online Library

When I was studying psychology at Laval University, in the beautiful city of Quebec, Canada, one of my great pleasure was to go to the main library and randomly read from compendiums of articles on psychoanalysis. I remember the quiet excitement of having access to so much knowledge at the tip of my fingers. I felt surrounded by a warm community of thinkers that were, like me, striving to understand the human heart.

This is why graduation came with a sense of loss. Working as a psychologist in private practice in a different city, I would no longer have free access to my intellectual kindred spirits. I quickly understood that yearly subscriptions to scientific papers were just too expensive for a beginning psychologist. I also noticed that the articles I was interested in were published in different journals and that it would be impossible to gain access to all of them. Even if I bought different book editions of the works of Freud, Melanie Klein, or Bowlby, I felt alone in a relationship with ghosts. I needed access to new research, contemporary scholars. That was one of the joys I experienced when I started reading books and articles by Kernberg , Clarkin, Yeomans, Caligor, Diamond and others.

During my TFP training, the word wide web was developing and beginning to give me access to recent scientific articles. I gradually noticed that with TFP supervisions, I experienced the best of both worlds: a community of colleagues that treated patients with personality disorders and a community of thinkers that would reflect on the psyche from a psychoanalytic angle. Still, I had mainly access to new research because of the generosity of my supervisors or colleagues that would share some PDF’s with me. It was better, but not enough to feel surrounded by science as I did during my university years.

As I got involved in the ISTFP, I started dreaming. I dreamt of a repository of all TFP related articles. A virtual place that would make me feel surrounded by my peers. My nomination as co-chair of the Public Relations and Communications Committee gave me the team and the means to make it a reality.

Dear members, in this article, I will present two new services provided to ISTFP members for disseminating TFP articles to all of those who wish to join the reflexion on personality and its disorders. All of the members of the PR committee hope it will ensure that a next generation of TFP therapists and supervisors will feel embraced by a community of minds thinking about the different aspects of the theory and practice of TFP.

ISTFP-PRESS

ISTFP-PRESS provides a way for any member of the ISTFP to send their new paper to the entire ISTFP community by using this email service. Currently, we have sent three articles in the last two month.

September 17th 2023 – Treating Narcissistic Personality Disorders: a case illustration of key clinical contributions from Transference Focused Psychotherapy for psychoanalytic practitioners.

October 8th 2023 – Rothko’s Tears

October 15th 2023 – Conversion to Transference-Focused Psychotherapy from Other Treatments by the Same Therapist: Pitfalls and Benefits

You are a member of the ISTFP and did not receive them? Email us at [email protected] and we will help you get access to latest publication in your inbox.

If you are an author, and want to by read by our entire community, send us your paper in PDF format with a “stunning” picture of yourself at the same email: [email protected]. We can host your paper on the ISTFP website for free and make it accessible for the general public who visit our website or only for members, depending on what you specify.

The TFP Online Library

This project is the full embodiment of our dream. It is a searchable database of all Transference Focused Psychotherapy publications with a link to the full-text PDF. It is incomplete for now and the Full-Text links are from different sources on the Web but it the first step in making all TFP papers freely available to all members.

You can try it by following this link: TFP Online Library

As you will see, the search function is now limited to one search term at a time and limited keywords. We will gradually add more keywords for each publication and hope that the technology permit us to use several search terms. We plan to bring full text access to all ISTFP members. Non-members will also be able to search the database but will have access to a limited number of full-text PDFs.

The complexity of sharing scientific knowledge

When we started this project, it was hard to assess the legal roadblocks that would limit its creation and scope. That is why we propose a collective reflexion on sharing our knowledge on personality disorders and transference focused psychotherapy.

What we found is that many of you are willing to share their papers with everyone but it became very hard to know the rights you have, as author, for sharing your published work. There are many scientific journals and each one has its own regulations and legal agreements. So I decided to find more information to solve this problem.

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing, formed in 2017, is a group of publishers that worked together for bringing copyright compliance to scholarly collaboration networks and to article-sharing platforms that many of you are using, like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. As you can read in this well documented page of the University of Oklahoma, these social platforms for scholars are owned by for-profit organizations that use unethical practices like not peer-reviewing articles that are uploaded on their platform and offering authors to pay for having their articles appear more often in search results. They were sued for illegal distribution of copyrighted articles. Recent news mentions that many litigations between publishers and ResearchGate were resolved, but not with Academia. The latter improperly uses an “.edu” top-level domain (TLD). This is considered by many as an unacceptable use of a TLD that was meant to represent true educational institutions worldwide.

This is why we decided to link the articles you made accessible through ResearchGate with the TFP Online Library but not the ones that are hosted by Acedemia.edu. We also noticed that some of you have no PDFs of any of your articles on the web. If you want to make them accessible, you can open a ResearchGate account and send us the links that the platform will provide for your papers. But before doing so, be sure to read ResearchGate’s copyright information page. If you don’t want to create a ResearchGate account, contact us, and we will host your work on the ISTFP website if the copyright terms of your publishers allow it.

Are you allowed to share your work?

Before submitting a paper to our project, this is the most important question you have to ask yourself. It will ensure that the ISTFP is protected from any liability.

In my research, I discovered that many of you have published in Taylor & Francis or Routledge journals. They are a good example of publishers that hand out clear sharing guidelines for sharing scientific articles. I strongly suggest that you all visit the Taylor & Francis or Routledge website to get a sense of how copyrights work for scientific papers. If you come across guidelines from other publishers, I will gladly add them to this article.

Our team is eager to see if can all unite in a common ideal of sharing scientific knowledge about personality disorders and are looking forward to see how you will contribute to this considerable endeavour.

Warm regards,

Mathieu Norton-Poulin

Representing the voice of the members of the ISTFP’s Public Relations and Communications Committee