The Journal of Analytical Psychology’s 2027 International Conference was announced earlier this year. With the call for papers deadline now extended to August 31, 2026, it seems a good moment to bring it back to attention and to share the full program, which has since been announced.
The Theme and Call for Papers
The Space Between: Its Limits and Possibilities, Collapse and Metamorphosis in the Analytic Vessel and the World takes place in Split, Croatia from October 14 to 17, 2027. The conference invites reflection on the liminal spaces of analytic work; where emotional experience exceeds symbolisation, the frame is tested, and meaning may be absent, emergent, or in transformation. Clinical contributions are warmly welcomed, as are papers addressing the wider cultural, historical, political, and technological context in which analytic work is situated, including AI, psychedelics, intergenerational and collective trauma, and cultural upheaval.
Proposals of 500 words for 30 to 45 minute breakout sessions should be submitted by August 31, 2026 to Esther Waldron, Managing Editor, at esther@thesap.org.uk.
The Program
The conference opens on Thursday October 14 with a pre-conference day of workshops and clinical discussion groups. Three workshops run in parallel, each offered twice so participants can attend two: Donald Kalsched on recognising defensive patterns in dreams as a key to developing affect-competency; Chiara Tozzi on the enemy, the friend, and the beyond; and Mark Saban on exploring the transindividual field in analysis. The afternoon brings clinical discussion groups on four themes: psyche, soma, and the psychoid in the consulting room; cultural complex and collective pressures; AI intrusions into the analytic space; and talking about gender and sex.
Each of the three main conference days opens with a social dreaming matrix convened by Ali Zarbafi, and follows a thematic arc. Friday focuses on containment and its vicissitudes, its collapse, survival, and possible emergence or metamorphosis, with plenary talks from Jay Barlow on the reticent child, Lara Lagutina on shared dreaming on the edge of collapse, and a closing plenary from Donald Kalsched revisioning analytical psychology through early infant studies and attachment trauma. Saturday turns to moments of meeting, enactments, self-disclosure, somatisation, and psyche-soma confusions, with Martin Schmidt on self-disclosure and enactment in the anatomy of sudden change, and Nora Swan-Foster on spontaneous images in the underworld of unrepresented states of being. The day closes with a conference gala dinner.
Sunday’s theme is perhaps the most contemporary: treatment in a politically fractious world, and the pressures and intrusions into the analytic vessel from cultural upheaval, conflict, and collective and intergenerational trauma. Renos Papadopoulos opens with a revisiting of the coniunctio oppositorum, polarisation, destructiveness, and transformation. Antonio Lanfranchi follows with a paper on witnessing at the limits of disavowal: analysis during the destruction of Gaza. The conference closes with a final plenary at 12:45pm.
Booking information is to follow, and we will keep you informed.