Call for Proposals

The conference organizers of the 45th Annual Spring Meeting for the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39 of the APA are pleased to invite you to submit proposals to the 2026 conference theme:institutional life:reclaiming life from institutions

This conference invites us to critically consider how we participate in the discipline of psychoanalysis–and how the discipline of psychoanalysis disciplines us. Together we will consider the analytic implications of what is referred to as “institutional life.”

As a field that relies on institutions to transmit knowledge, teach our theory, and grow a community, we see being part of institutions as necessary or innocuous or even - respectable; that psychoanalysis is a part of larger institutions and has its own institutions legitimizes psychoanalysis. But at what cost? How often do we confront who these institutions answer to, the way we conform or adapt our theory to avoid disruption, and what we give up (and ask those who seek to train or study with us to give up) to be a part of them? 

As a profession concerned with containment, repression, displacement, and identification, how do these processes show themselves within the institutional unconscious of our universities, training programs, hospitals, clinics, and institutes? How do we stay attuned to and curious about the institutional processes that are withheld from being conscious? And how do we ask ourselves to both see and resist the urge to align our own unconscious processes and identities with the unconscious processes and public-facing identity of the institution? 

How do we maintain a stance of claiming/reclaiming life within institutions, when the very nature of an institution is to pressure the community that enlivens it to conform to its values and codes (values and codes that are often only expressed through actions, inactions, and discipline and that are at odds with its publicly stated missions, purposes, and values)? We ask how or what would be necessary to make or reclaim lives while working in institutions when often the institution itself is focused on its own longevity, not the vitality and expansiveness of its community members/laborers.

We invite you to reflect and share about the ways we minimize or deny the waywe become institutionalized. Through an investment in psychoanalyzing systems, structures, and clarity about our own collusion in the desire for power and legitimacy that is shored up by institutions, this conference hones in on the conscious and unconscious institutional processes that place constraints on ourselves, our colleagues, our neighbors, and our patients. 

Additionally, we hope to confront within ourselves the allure and seduction of institutions, to make visible what we are seeking, elevating, exclusivizing, and erasing when we unconsciously seek to be absorbed into a system so as to maintain its homeostasis.

With emphasis on the present-day processes of state repression, university enclosure, transnational displacement, and creeping and normalizing of carceral containment under the guise of safety and security, this conference locates the institutional and the interpersonal at the center of our psychoanalytic concern and curiosity. 

We eagerly invite psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary engagements and critiques related to institutionality; colonization; complaint; silences and silencing; complicity and capitulation; captivation; violence and violation; boundaries; enclosure; alienation; entanglement; experiments; embodiment; abandonment; grief; the elsewhere/otherwise; the commons/undercommons; carcerality; subaltern counterpublics; punks; deviants; street art; graffiti; taking up public space; lovers in the park; neodada and dada – all that undergirds institutional life: reclaiming life from institutions. 

We look forward to submissions that weave together the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and institutional, as well as submissions that divest from the conventional conference session format; workshops, somatic-centered sessions, facilitated experiences, and thematic/unstructured/participatory conversations are invited, among other formats.