2025 Spring Meeting

The conference organizers of the 44th Spring Meeting of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39 of the APA are pleased to invite you to submit proposals to this year’s theme: Bodies in Praxis.

Psychoanalysis, and Freud’s development of the theory of the unconscious, began with a query into how and why bodies express symptoms of psychic repression. Freud’s initial cases of hysteria (or, “the wandering womb”) involved creating a "talking cure" through free association for these somatic expressions of unconscious psychic life. In addition to continuing to theorize how the unconscious speaks through the body, this conference offers a place to consider how environmental, systemic, and political bodies impact physical bodies; how bodies shape psychic experience; how bodies (of humans, of resistance, of land and place, relational and sexual bodies, and more-than-human bodies) are shaped by intrapsychic dynamics, such as desire and aggression, as well as structural power, appropriation, and commodification; and to explore interrelationships with bodies and spaces across multiple disciplines and across the lifespan.

This conference centers the position that bodies are always already politicized, thus political context is integral to a psychoanalytic theory of bodies. Specifically, we aim to address bodies in context and in praxis: How do we live out our values and ethics, and what is it we are actually doing when we do psychoanalysis? Through the word “praxis” we evoke the non-linear interrelationship of theory, reflection, and action. Among multiple possibilities, we especially invite psychoanalytic engagement and discussion pertaining to carceral systems; colonial entanglements, capitalism, and liberatory praxis; technologies and their uses; artificial intelligence; Indigenous knowledge systems; the ongoing genocides, ecocides, and epistemicides; the ways in which racist and anti-trans policy impacts livability, violations on bodies; experiences of aging and bodies over time; bodies “on the line”; and how disability justice informs our need both for access to spaces as well as a re-envisioning of spaces, places, theories, and material realities.

Additionally, because this is a virtual conference, we wish to stay alert to the ways we may be pulled to become disembodied or dissociated during the conference itself, and consider how we might vitalize and invigorate our contact with one another. In order to stay connected while apart, we are curious about how we might make “intentional accidents.” We invite you to find ways to bring your bodies, contexts, and environments into the virtual space through your presentations. Because we exist as more than heads in rectangular boxes in the virtual clinic and in our meeting rooms, we challenge participants to find, listen to, and make contact with our bodies together despite not being in the same place, breathing the same air, being able to hug, and sit next to one another. We also invite conversations that ask, what must we grieve and what might we gain from this format?

Special attention will be given to presentations that encourage discussion and collaboration between participant presenters and attendees. We also encourage multigenerational panels and roundtables, discussions that center bodies and lived experiences which are often absented from psychoanalytic theory and technique writ large, and presentations that invite interdisciplinary approaches to psychoanalytic thinking and praxis. We also invite presentations that include collaborative action focusing on what participants can do when they leave the conference.

The conference will take place online from April 3-6, 2025. We look forward to being together next April.

Warm regards,

Conference Co-Chairs:
Kritika Dwivedi, PsyD, and Molly Merson, LMFT


Steering Committee:

Sodah Minty, PsyD
Isheh Beck, PsyD
Sara Ghalaini, LICSW
Chaim Rochester, MA
Travis Marchman, MA
Almas (Ally) Merchant, PsyD