The Journal of Analytical Psychology has announced its 2027 International Conference, to be held in Split, Croatia from October 14 to 17. The theme — The Space Between: Its Limits and Possibilities, Collapse and Metamorphosis in the Analytic Vessel and the World — speaks directly to where much of the most urgent clinical and theoretical thinking in analytical psychology finds itself right now. The call for papers is open, with a deadline of July 31, 2026.
A Conference Series with Reach and Ambition
The JAP has hosted international conferences since 1996, and the series has built a reputation for choosing themes that sit at the intersection of clinical depth and contemporary urgency. Recent gatherings have moved across continents and concerns: the 2017 New York conference tackled dissociation, trauma, and the self in downtown Manhattan; the 2019 London conference addressed displacement and contemporary traumatic experience; the 2021 São Paulo conference, held partly online, explored civilisation in transition from clinical, social, and academic perspectives; and the 2024 conference at Essex University took on the theme of crossing borders — clinical, theoretical, cultural, and political — with plenary speakers including Monica Luci, Andrew Samuels, and Karin Fleischer. Most recently, the Journal marked its 70th anniversary in 2025 with an online conference reflecting on the field’s past controversies and present directions, featuring former US editor John Beebe among others.
Split, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, is a fitting location for a conference on thresholds and in-between spaces. The city was built around and within the palace of the Roman Emperor Diocletian — ancient and contemporary life coexisting for centuries within the same walls, a living example of what it means to inhabit the space between one world and another.
The Theme
The 2027 conference invites reflection on the liminal spaces that define analytic work: the thresholds where emotional experience exceeds symbolisation, where the frame is tested, and where meaning may be absent, emergent, or in the process of transformation. Collapse, impasse, and uncertainty are treated not as failures but as the very conditions in which psychic movement, creative emergence, and metamorphosis become possible.
The call for papers is broad. Clinical contributions are warmly invited — on early or unformulated states of mind, shared unconscious processes, somatisation and shared psychosomatic states, transference and countertransference dynamics, and the analyst’s capacity to remain present at the limits of what can be held or known. Equally welcome are papers that situate analytic work within the wider cultural, historical, political, and technological context — including reflections on AI, psychedelics, intergenerational and collective trauma, and cultural upheaval.
How to Submit
Proposals of 500 words should be submitted by 31st July 2026 to Esther Waldron, Managing Editor, at esther@thesap.org.uk.