The International Association for Analytical Psychology has issued its call for papers for the XXIV International Congress for Analytical Psychology, to be held in Rome from August 27 to September 1, 2028.
The congress theme is Psyche’s Search for Temenos in Times of Turmoil: Witnessing, Engaging, Transforming, and speaks directly to the conditions under which analytical psychology currently finds itself practised. Wars, political polarisation, ecological crisis, mass displacement, and technological acceleration are not abstract backdrops but lived realities entering the consulting room daily, reverberating through the earliest layers of psychic organisation and pressing on the analyst’s own capacity to remain present without being overwhelmed. The concept of temenos is Jung’s term for the sacred, protected yet permeable space in which transformation becomes possible, and anchors the congress’s central inquiry: how do we create and sustain such a container, personally and collectively, in an era of fragmentation?
Rome itself is not an incidental choice. Jung described it as a city that carries within it the coexistence of different psychic strata of empire and renewal, sacred and profane, creation and destruction, and famously struggled to visit it, repeatedly finding unconscious impediments to making the journey. The city’s layered history makes it a living embodiment of what the congress is asking about: how the past persists within the present, and what it means to witness, engage with, and transform what has been buried rather than resolved. The congress will be held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome’s Flaminio district, the most visited cultural building in Europe.
The Call for Papers
The Program Committee welcomes proposals across a wide range of formats: single presentations, joint presentations and panel discussions, plenaries, posters, workshops, and other formats including film, performance, and experiential groups. Presentations may be offered in any language, with an English translation required three weeks before the congress opens. Proposals should be no more than 500 words and submitted via the congress online platform by November 16, 2026. Full submission guidelines and practical details are available here. Program decisions will be announced by June 2027.
The Program Committee is chaired by Brockton Hill and includes representatives from analytical psychology organisations in the USA, Colombia, Switzerland, South Africa, Lithuania, Japan, Italy, Uruguay, and Canada. The congress is presided over by IAAP President Pilar Amezaga.
The Logo
The congress logo brings together two images that reward Jungian reflection. The first is the tortoise. In his seminar discussions, Jung described the tortoise as “a most fundamental being, the basic instinct that carries our whole psychological world,” connecting it to Hindu cosmology in which the world is carried on the back of an elephant standing on a tortoise. For Jung, the tortoise carried a maternal, underground, and deeply impersonal quality. The shell which represents protection without withdrawal and containment without closure makes it a remarkably apt symbol for the temenos the congress wishes to explore.
The second image is the dome of the Roman Pantheon, an architectural temenos open to the sky through the oculus at its centre. Where the tortoise speaks of instinct and endurance, the Pantheon speaks of culture, structure, and the deliberate creation of a space where the transcendent can enter. Together, the two images hold the tension the congress itself is built around: nature and architecture, the archaic and the contemporary, the living and the constructed.