42nd International Conference on Psychology and the Arts
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, England, United Kingdom
June 23—June 26, 2026
Hosted by PsyArt Foundation and University of Essex
Welcome
We are pleased to announce that the 42nd International Conference on Psychology and the Arts will be held at University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, England, UK, June 23-June 26, 2026. The University of Essex, with three campuses, was founded as a research university by public charter in 1965, and is one of the original plate glass universities. With a commitment to academic excellence and diversity, The University of Essex’s Colchester campus is “a world in one place,” home to 15,000 students from over 130 countries. It is also a leading institution in the field of psychoanalytic studies with a world-renowned Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies. The conference is sponsored and hosted by PsyArt Foundation and University of Essex.
CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT FOR CONSIDERATION
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE
Plenary Speaker
This year’s plenary speaker is Marilyn Charles, Ph.D., A.B.P.P.
Dr. Charles is a staff psychologist, team leader, supervisor, and member of the therapy staff at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, USA. She is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and the University of Monterrey (UDEM). She is actively engaged in mentoring, creating professional opportunities, and promoting community involvement for those in the helping professions, which includes her previous consultation work with Gunawirra in Sydney, Australia, and with counseling centers and residential treatment centers in the USA. Her writing, teaching, supervision, and consultations focus on encouraging the development of future generations of clinicians and on promoting higher standards of practice in the field. She earned her MA and PhD in Clinical Psychology at Michigan State University. Her research and clinical interests include creativity, psychosis, resilience, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. As a poet and artist, Dr. Charles’s interest also lies in the creative process, investigating factors that facilitate and inhibit creativity. .
Dr. Charles is the author of numerous books, including Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience (2002), Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, 3) (2004), Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan (New Imago: Series in Theoretical, Clinical, and Applied Psychoanalysis) (2011), and Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live (2015), and Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis (2025). In 2020, Dr. Charles was winner of the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize in the Applied Category for her book co-edited with Jill Bellinson, PhD, entitled, The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment, and Developmental Perspectives (2019).
Dr. Charles is actively involved in a variety of professional affiliations, including Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and Contributing Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; International Coordinator of the Psychoanalytic Track at University of Monterrey; former President of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a current editorial board member of the APA’s Journal, Psychoanalytic Psychology.
Overview
The organizers of PsyArt2026 invite 150-word abstracts for papers dealing with any application of psychology–including but not limited to psychoanalysis, object relations, feminist, Jungian, and Lacanian approaches, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience–to the study of literature, film and visual media, painting, sculpture, music, performance, and the other arts. A maximum of seventy-five papers will be accepted for presentation. We also warmly welcome conferees who do not present papers. The conference is convivial and draws scholars from around the world.
Abstract submissions: deadline for abstract submissions is February 28, 2026.
CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT FOR CONSIDERATION
Registration fees: regular registration fees are due by March 31, 2026. Late registration fees are due by April 30, 2026. Late registration fees will NOT be accepted after April 30, 2026.
Note: the calculated conference registration fees are based on US dollar (USD) to Pounds Sterling (GBP) exchange rates calculated at the time this program was built in October 2025. These exchange rates fluctuate, so the prices will have slight variations at the time of your registration. USD represents the fixed price for registration fees. GBP represents the fixed price for hotel accommodation.
Your registration fee includes the following benefits:
- Opening reception at University of Essex
- Attendance at all panel sessions
- Lunch
- Conference dinner
Add-ons (not in your registration fee) include the following:
- Post-conference tour to Colchester Castle (cancelled)
Refund Policy:
Refunds will be given up to 7 days before the start of the event, i.e., June 16, 2026 (excluding processing fees). After this date, no refunds will be given.
For questions or assistance, please reach out to the following organizers:
Alexander Vénetis
Vice President, PsyArt Foundation: a.venetis@uva.nl.
Antal Bókay
Secretary, PsyArt Foundation: antal.bokay@gmail.com.
Marcie Newton
Treasurer, PsyArt Foundation: thepsyartfoundation@gmail.com.
Raluca Soreanu
Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies; Deputy Director of Research: raluca.soreanu@essex.ac.uk.
Magda Schmukalla
Lecturer, Dept. of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies: m.schmukalla@essex.ac.uk.
Preliminary Conference Outline
Tuesday, June 23
Welcome evening reception at University of Essex.
Wednesday, June 24
Opening of the conference in the morning; plenary speaker presentation; fellowship presentations; afternoon parallel panel sessions; Directors’ meeting (PsyArt Directors only)
Thursday, June 25
Morning and afternoon parallel sessions; conference dinner at The Barn, Colchester
Friday, June 26
Morning parallel sessions; members’ meeting in the afternoon and group photos;
Papers
Papers should be short, 20 minutes at most (approx. 2,500 words). Please observe the time limit. Normal speaking rate is 140 words per minute, and, for clarity, a scholarly presentation should be somewhat slower for the purpose of speaking at the pace of audience comprehension. Please try to limit or avoid jargon. An additional ten minutes are allotted for discussion of each paper, usually at the end of the panel session. The panel moderator/chair is responsible for keeping speakers to 20 minutes.
Note: if there are co-presenters, each presenter must pay the registration fee.
English is the conference language. We recommend that any speakers who are not native speakers of English accompany their talks with a PowerPoint presentation.
Following the conference, please consider submitting your paper to the PsyArt Journal for publication.
Please prepare an abstract, 150 words maximum. The deadline for submitting the abstract is February 28, 2026.
CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT FOR CONSIDERATION.
If your abstract is accepted, an acceptance letter and registration details will follow from Vice President, Alexander Venetis. If you do not hear back about your abstract submission within 14 days, please email Alexander Venetis and/or Marcie Newton.
Student Fellowships
PsyArt Foundation is offering two fellowships:
1. Norman and Jane Holland Travel Fellowship of $500 (USD) / £ 372 (GBP) for outstanding graduate student papers (prior to completing the Ph.D.). These can be awarded only once per person, but you can apply every year until you win. To be considered for a fellowship, please send a 500-word maximum conference abstract by February 1, 2026, to the PsyArt Vice-President, Alexander Vénetis, at a.venetis@uva.nl. If your abstract is accepted for the conference, you will be required to provide your conference paper by February 28, 2026, for consideration of the fellowship. Your conference paper will need to be supported by an academic recommendation. A decision will be made by March 15, 2026.
Please note: We do not accept co-written papers for fellowship submissions.
2. In memory of our longtime Vice President, Andrew Gordon, PsyArt Foundation also offers one Andrew Gordon Fellowship of $500 (USD) / £372 (GBP) for Ph.D. students who are participating at the conference for the first time. A supporting letter from the supervisor is necessary. To be considered for a fellowship, send a 500-word maximum conference abstract and supporting letter by February 1, 2026, to PsyArt’s Vice-President, Alexander Vénetis, at a.venetis@uva.nl. If your abstract is accepted for the conference, you will be required to provide your conference paper by February 28, 2026. A decision will be made by March 15, 2026.
Please note: We do not accept co-written papers for fellowship submissions.
Registration Fees & Payment
The deadline for sending us your title and abstract is February 28, 2026, or when we have 100 accepted abstracts, registration forms, and registration fees, whichever comes sooner. Once you receive notice that your abstract is accepted, you will be notified and can then pay your registration fee to be assured a place at the conference. Note that we also welcome conference attendees who do not plan on presenting a paper.
For each person attending the conference, please fill out the registration online form and pay the registration fee. Please indicate clearly “No Paper” if that is the case.
For a complete registration, we require three items:
- A completed registration form (see below) including paper title.
- Brief abstract of paper (150 words maximum), if you are giving a paper. These abstracts enable us to decide if your paper is acceptable for the conference and then to place your paper in an appropriate session. We also publish them on our website.
- A registration fee. See registration payment details below.
Important:
- Ensure your email address is typed correctly to receive a response. If, by March 15, 2026, you are not receiving emails from us, let us know.
- Do not assume that some currency arrangement you made the previous year is still effective.
- Do not leave your registration for someone else to complete unless you are a guest, i.e., a child under 18, friend, or family member attending as a non-presenter.
- Ensure that we have your complete registration (all three items) and your correct email address. Fill out a separate form and pay for each person attending.
To register, click here. U.S. and non-U.S. registrants will be taken to our PsyArt account at Eventbrite.com. (Note: if you plan to present a paper, the abstract must first be submitted for acceptance.
The conference registration fee is based on the current 0.76 exchange rate from USD to GBP on November 11, 2025. These exchange rates fluctuate so the GBP price will have slight variations at the time of registration.
- $325 (USD) / £247 (GBP) Early Bird Special (expires on Dec. 31, 2025. Then $375 (USD) / £285 (GBP), plus processing fee. Amount includes reception, conference packet, panel sessions, coffee breaks, lunch, and conference dinner . It excludes the post-conference excursion.
- $175 (USD) / £133 (GBP) Early Bird Special (expires on Dec. 31, 2025. Then $225 (USD) / £170 (GBP) for graduate students and University of Essex faculty/staff, plus processing fee.* Amount includes reception, conference packet, panel sessions, coffee breaks, lunch, and conference dinner.
- $97.5 (USD) / £74 (GBP) for guests, plus processing fee, i.e., children under 18 of conferees; and partners, friends, or family wishing to attend the reception and conference dinner only, plus processing fee. Amount includes reception and conference dinner only. NOTE: The Friends and Family fee excludes the conference panel sessions, coffee breaks, and lunch, and it excludes the post-conference excursion.
$25 of the conference registration fee is a non-refundable tax-deductible donation to PsyArt Foundation, which supports the conference, the journal, and the website. If you require a refund (given up to 7 days before the start of the event), it will not include the processing fee or $25 donation.
Late Fees
$50 will be added to late registration fees after March 31, 2026. No payments will be accepted after April 30, 2026.
The registration fee (except for the $25 non-refundable donation) is refundable for any reason (excluding processing fees) until June 16, 2026, but not for any reason thereafter. The $25 donation makes you a member of PsyArt, which also entitles you to attend and to vote at the annual meeting to be held on Friday, June 26, 2026, at the conference. Please do attend and vote.
In the unlikely event that the organizers need to cancel the conference, we will notify you by March 1, 2026. In this event, you will be refunded your registration fee. Please note that we do not refund flights, hotels, or any other costs incurred.
If you are having problems registering or have any other questions related to registration, please contact our Treasurer, Marcie Newton, at thepsyartfoundation@gmail.com.
To register, click here. (Note: if you plan to present a paper, an abstract must first be submitted for acceptance.
Accommodation
There are a wide range of accommodation options at University of Essex, Wivenhoe, and its surrounding areas, from student accommodation offering budget ensuite rooms to well-furnished quality hotels and Airbnbs in town with buses departing from Wivenhoe Railway Station (51 timetable) or the Co-OP ( 87 timetable) with a journey of approximately 17 minutes. (If you’re coming in from town, there are 3 main stops on Boundary Road that circle the campus. Get off at the Subway Stop (first stop) which is in front of the Essex Business School event venue.) You can also book a hotel through reputable sites like Booking.com, Expedia.com, and Airbnb.com or contact other hotels directly. Please note: We encourage you not to book accommodation in Colchester itself because traffic can be very heavy at peak times.
See below for an affordable and discounted option on the University of Essex campus.
South Courts Student Accommodation
South Courts student accommodation is available (no promo code). Prices are £49 per night.
Rooms at South Courts are single ensuite with shared kitchen facilities and are based at The University of Essex Campus. Bed linen and towels are provided. The rate is £49.00 per person per night. Click here to book a room directly with the University of Essex.
Wivenhoe House Hotel
Wivenhoe House Hotel, a 4-star hotel, is the quintessential English-staying experience.
Classic rooms are approximately £165 (GBP) per night.
Reach out to Magda Schmukalla at m.schmukalla@essex.ac.uk should you need assistance.
Travel
GETTING TO CAMPUS
BY PLANE:
LONDON STANSTED AIRPORT (STN): There is a regular X20 bus service from Stansted Airport to Colchester Town Centre.
LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT (LHR): There are 4 National Express coaches a day running directly from T2 and T3 to Colchester town centre. The journey takes between 2:30-3hrs. Alternatively, from LHR you can take the recently inaugurated Elizabeth Line to Liverpool St. or Stratford stations, where you will find direct trains to Colchester North and Wivenhoe.
If you’d like to take a taxi from Heathrow to Colchester, you can book by tapping here.
BY EUROSTAR:
Eurostar trains from Europe arrive at London St. Pancras Station. From there, it
is only 3 stops in the underground (Circle, Hammersmith & City, or Metropolitan lines) to Liverpool Street, where you will find trains to Colchester North and
Wivenhoe stations.
BY TRAIN:
If you already live in the UK, you can reach Colchester by train.
Hythe Station (Essex): This is the preferred station to travel to as it is within walking distance of the university.
Colchester (North) Station (Essex): After reaching Colchester North Station, you can take a taxi or bus to the University of Essex or to your accommodation. Taxis are usually lining up outside the station – but you can also book them in advance . (check http://panther-group.co.uk/ or call: 01206 525 525). The 51 and 87 buses also stop here.
Colchester Town Station (Essex): If your accommodation is in the Town Centre, then this is your train stop. The town center is just 10-minutes’ walk away.To get to campus from this station, you’d need to walk to the High Street and catch one of the following buses: 51 or 87.
Wivenhoe Station: If your accommodation is in the lovely Wivenhoe, then get off at this train station. To get to campus, you can catch the 51 bus from the station, or bus 87 from the Co-op supermarket.
BY BUS:
From the Town Centre: Get on the 51 or 87 buses from the High Street in Colchester. There are two stops on this street: 87 stop at Fc and S1 at Angel
Court (Stop Gb). It will take you around 25 minutes to get to campus.
From Wivenhoe: To get to campus, you can catch the 51 from the station, or the 51 or 87 from the CoOp
Getting off on campus: there are three main stops on Boundary road, the road circling campus:
- The first stop (called Subway Stop) is in front of our Essex Business School. This is the closest stop to the event venue.
- The second stop is Valley Road, close to the Psychology Department and the Computer Science Building.
- The last stop, South Courts, is the nearest stop to conference campus accommodation.
Also click on How to Get Here for all your travel needs.
Reach out to Magda Schmukalla at magda.schmukalla@essex.ac.uk should you need assistance.
About Colchester
Wivenhoe is a small, picturesque riverside town a few miles from Colchester with a rich history of fishing and boat building. It offers a delightful walk called the Town to Sea Trail from Wivenhoe Quayside to Colchester’s historic Hythe port along the bank of the River Colne. The trail is marked with waymarkers illustrating Colchester’s history, then as the route changes to the Wivenhoe trail, you cross the river next to the permanently moored TS Colne Lightship and continue through the Essex Countryside and local woodland towards your destination. It has a beautiful harbor, shops, and, of course, pubs.
Photo by Roger Tamblyn. Image ID 2JNY0FM. Copyright Source: Alamy
Colchester, with its rich history spanning 2,000 years, is Britain’s oldest recorded town. Even before the Romans named it their Capital, Camulodunum, back in approx. 40 AD, Colchester was an Iron Age prehistoric settlement. Besides having beautiful gardens and a quaint Dutch Quarter, historical landmarks that still exist today include Colchester Castle, St. Botolph’s Priory, and the only known Roman Circus.
Program
Tuesday, June 23
19:00–21:00: Welcome evening reception at University of Essex.
Wednesday, June 24 – Friday, June 26: Conference Schedule
Local time is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT+1)
The plenary lecture and panel sessions take place at University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, England, UK.
Tel. + 44 (0)1206 873261
Contact Information Sheet
Forthcoming
Abstracts
The Plenary Lecture:
Marilyn Charles, Ph.D.
Austen Riggs Center, Massachusetts, USA; affiliated with Harvard Medical School, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and the
University of Monterrey (UDEM)
Language and Lyricism: The Aesthetic Underbelly of Psychoanalysis
In a letter to Roman Rolland in 1920, Freud linked his ‘deaf ear’ to his difficulties entering the terrain referred to as ‘mysticism’. In striking opposition, I have always admired the equally inaccessible, to me, terrain of secondary-process driven language links that helped Freud find the kernels at the core. However, Freud’s deaf ear left the terrain of primary process relatively untraveled. It was left to others to mine these less conscious reaches. Kristeva helps mark this dilemma by pointing to the unconscious as the realm of semiotics, meanings, known through their rhythms and prosodies, the lyricism that gives the narrative its potency and its poetry. At this level of embodied experience, rhythm is also the terrain of the affect phrases described by Lyotard and referred to by Milner as the bastion of creative productivity. Aulagnier extends our understanding, reaching back, perhaps into the terrain explored by Rolland, de Certeau, and others, to recognise that there is always a prehistory that informs our story-as-lived.
In my lecture, I will discuss ways in which our greater attention to the aesthetic underpinnings of lived meanings opposes the deadening of the complex trauma affecting us all, thereby potentially bringing us closer to the sources of our own creativity. Essential in this endeavour is our willingness to mourn both lack and loss so that we might touch others through excursions into our own suffering. In this way, we play out the prosodies of life and death: love and redemption through which human tragedy enlivens and enriches experience. To illustrate, I will offer some examples from my poetry and also from a work of mourning undertaken through a series of collages, through which I literally pieced together the fragments in ways I hoped might be redemptive to others as well.
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Postgraduate Fellowship Lectures:
Yuchen Li
University of Essex, UK
The Future of Disgust in Art: Retrieving the Revolting Body Against Hegemony
Disgust is theorised as a reaction to the intrusion of the other into the boundary of subjectivity, in which the ‘other’ is the ‘othered’ existence, a product of the cultural hegemony expressed in aesthetic experiences and a sign for the politicalisation of aesthetic experience – what haunts us is what challenges our harmonic existence within the discourse and our unconscious conformity to power. But what comes after the disgust? Through Ngai’s light touch on the Kristevan abjection, I enquire into the ’future’ of disgust through post-Lacanian feminist theories of Bracha Ettinger, which I read as a theorisation of the body co-existing with the object or the other in aesthetic experience. This presentation will include a theoretical discussion, as well as an illustration of, Ettinger’s theories through London-based artist Shuang Jiang’s visual artwork, Rupture (2025), which is used for the cover art of a music release of mine. The concept of disgust, as it arises from tensions between art and its marketisation, will be explored.
Dhritiman Ray
University of Nottingham, UK
The Life Stories of Daily Objects: Communicating Trauma Through the Mundane
How can a subject communicate the unbearable? Scholars studying trauma have often encountered the failure of language to convey the precise nature of traumatic experiences to the Other (Lăpugean, 2015). In this paper, I argue that this failure of language can be overcome by mobilising metaphors related to the mundane. In photo-based life story interviews about intergenerational and complex trauma in India, daily objects like ketchup bottles, TV sets, etc., often anchored experiences of extreme distress or profound emptiness. Through the use of mundane objects and metaphors, individuals communicated trauma by blurring the distinction between the ‘normal’ and the ‘traumatic’, finding external ways (external bodies) to contain overwhelming affect that ultimately allowed for the restoration of experiential coherence and overcoming of the dissociative vacuum.
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Lucca Alleweireldt
University of Ghent, Belgium
Butler with Lacan: Performative Theory as ‘Pas Tout’
Contemporary debates on sexuality and gender often frame Judith Butler’s poststructuralist feminist paradigm as opposed to the Lacanian theory of sexual difference. Against this reading, this paper argues for a structural homology between Butler’s performative theory of gender and the Lacanian ‘feminine’ logic of the pas tout. Rather than erasing sexual difference, the predicative proliferation of genders can be understood as a specific logical modality of ‘writing’ the absent sexual rapport – the non-rapport. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s formulae of sexuation and Fregean predicate logic, the non-relation is interpreted as a structural limit on totalising predication. By situating Butler’s performativity within the formulae of sexuation, this paper seeks to illuminate the emancipatory potential of the Lacanian insistence on the Real of sexual difference, the constitutive function of the structural absence of the sexual rapport in the human condition, and the notion of the phallic function as the signifier of castration.
Eira Betthell
University of Essex, UK
As Above, So Below: Warfare’s Destruction of the Inner and Outer Worlds as Symbolised by the World War I Artworks of Otto Dix
The psychological and symbolic pressures generated by World War I created a landscape in which inner and outer worlds fractured, collided, and were forced into new configurations. Otto Dix’s Der Krieg series of etchings emerges from this terrain, offering imagery that resonates with alchemy, symbolism, and the collective unconscious. Approaching the work through a Jungian lens reveals how Dix’s stark realism, shaped by Neue Sachlichkeit, exposes both the psychic disintegration and the transformative impulses activated by industrialised warfare. Incorporating accounts of German Army personnel at the Battle of the Somme, where Dix himself served, my analysis situates his visual language within the lived experience of prolonged frontline exposure. I argue that his images illuminate ways in which resilience can arise under conditions of extreme adversity. Der Krieg thus becomes a visual conduit through which viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the destructive and transformative forces endured by soldiers during armed conflict.
Antal Bókay, Ph.D.
University of Pécs, Hungary
Gaze, Fetish, Abject Mother: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of
Alexander McQueen’s Fashion Performance
This study interprets Alexander McQueen’s Voss fashion performance through a psychoanalytic lens. It argues that fashion is not merely aesthetic or commercial but expresses deep psychic structures of the self, the body, and desire. The fashion performance of McQueen follows a regressive trajectory from the adult perspective to Oedipal and pre-Oedipal abject maternal states. Structured by the logics of the gaze (Lacan), the fetish (Freud), and the abject (Kristeva), Voss can be read as McQueen’s self-analysis where the abject maternal body in the final scene signals the dominance of the death drive, foreshadowing the designer’s later suicide.
Adrian Chapman, Ph.D.
Florida State University, London Campus, UK
I Got Rhythm? R. D. Laing and the Politics of Somatic Experience
‘We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds’, wrote the Scottish countercultural psychiatrist R. D. Laing in ‘The Politics of Experience’, his 1967 indictment of alienation in the West. For Laing, a central symptom of this alienation was the widespread absence of what he termed ‘auto-rhythmia’ – one’s own rhythm of waking and sleeping, breathing, speaking, and so forth. Biological rhythms, Laing maintained, had become entrained to oppressive social norms; thus, was experience attenuated. In this presentation, I situate Laing’s auto-rhythmia historically in its medical, scientific, intellectual, and cultural contexts before considering (with reference to archival research) how Laing’s appeal to re-claim bodily rhythms played out in (i) Kingsley Hall (1965–1970), an experimental therapeutic setting founded in London by Laing; and (ii) in the psychiatrist’s own lecturing style, characterised by freewheeling, improvisatory performances that invited others to tune into their own bodily rhythms.
Anca Cristofovici
University of Caen, France
About Grieving and Reshaping Lives in David Constantine’s Novel, The Life-Writer
David Constantine’s novel, The Life-Writer (2015), is a story of loss and renewal that weaves ‘negative capability’ into the fabric of life. Underlying the grieving process is the question of what a life amounts to and how one can account for it. The narrative focuses on Katrin Szuba’s endeavor to track down an episode in his life that her dying husband had urged her to pursue. This daunting mission runs through the stages of Katrin’s mourning. How do the real figures who come her way, and others – ‘cultural objects’ she has written about as a historian – accompany Katrin on her journey into her husband’s past? How do her efforts to ‘shape a life into something fit to be looked at’ help her reshape her own? Drawing on object relations theories (Klein, Winnicott, Bollas), I explore how the bonds between creativity and grieving may transform loss into what Bollas called ‘psychic genera’.
Simon Crosbie, Ph.D.
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia
The Sublimated Hand: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Gesture in Media Representations of Institutional Child Abuse
Images of a priest’s clasped hands recur in media reports of clerical child abuse, condensing centuries of theological sublimation into a single, contradictory icon. Historically, the manus iunctae gesture signified feudal homage and theological surrender – body languages of humility and obedience before God. Architecturally, the gesture mirrors the Gothic church: two palms joined as a vault enclosing a hollow nave, a miniature cathedral built from flesh. Viewed psychoanalytically, however, this enclosure reveals a defensive anatomy. Drawing on Freud and Winnicott, the gesture of containment functions as defence and regression: a self-holding movement that wards off conflict and partitions unbearable knowledge. As a recurring media motif, this image reassures through traditional piety while staging the collapse of that ideal. The priest’s gesture thus embodies the Church’s historical architecture of obedience turned inward, symbolising repression as cultural style – prayer transfigured into a visible defence mechanism.
László Koppány Csáji, Ph.D.
Hungarian Academy of Arts Research Institute for Art Theory
and Methodology (HAA RIATM)
The Role of Art in the Conversion Process of New Religious Movements
Based on two decades of anthropological fieldwork in post-socialist countries, I developed the model of ‘threshold narratives’ to explain gradual initiation in new religious movements. Interested outsiders are introduced step by step to the group’s values and narratives, allowing time for learning while filtering out those who may disrupt cohesion. As individuals progress, they encounter increasingly distinctive and divisive teachings. This paper compares three case studies to examine the role of art in conversion: a charismatic Christian movement, a New Age movement, and a neopagan group whose radicalisation after the death of its shaman leader led to terrorism charges following the murder of a policeman. Combining insider and outsider perspectives, the study prioritises long-term participant observation over interviews, similar to Carl Rogers’s epistemological turn. It also connects anthropological and psychological approaches to religiosity and conversion, engaging theories by Raymond F. Paloutzian, Lewis Rambo, and Jacob A. Belzen.
João Da Silva Guerreiro, Ph.D.
University of Montreal, Canada
Fixing a Life? Narrative Stabilisation and the Ontology of Becoming
in Legal Decisions and Forensic Report Writing
Legal decision-making requires the construction of a coherent account of the individual accused of an offence. Judicial decisions produce a narratively stabilised subject capable of grounding responsibility and legal sanction. In this process, traumatic or victimisation experiences and relational complexity are often reframed within categories serving decisional clarity. The result is a legally actionable identity, fixed in time and structured for judgment. How might psychoanalytically informed forensic psychologists shape or nuance this construction through their own narrative practices? How can forensic narrativisation acknowledge its stabilising force and participation in a binary decision-making process (guilty/not guilty) while remaining interested in conveying an account of an individual faithful to an ontology of becoming (Bion) and ‘going on being’ (Winnicott)? The ethical challenge lies in the space between these ontologies: identity-for-decision and identity-in-becoming. Drawing on legal decisions and forensic psychological reports, this paper proposes a psychoanalytically informed forensic practice that does not dissolve this tension but renders it visible and thus ethically accountable.
Samir Dayal, Ph.D.
Bentley University, USA
The Work of Freedom: Island Consciousness as Ethical Withdrawal in
Richard Powers’ Novel, Playground
Since the COVID pandemic, withdrawal has taken on new and often suspect valences – commodified as self-care, marketed as digital detox, and practiced as elite escape. This paper rethinks withdrawal, not as retreat, optimisation, or sovereign exit but as the work through which freedom is ethically produced. Through a sustained reading of Richard Powers’ novel, Playground, I theorise island consciousness: a small Pacific island community’s collective and democratic refusal of AI-enabled seasteading that promises technological salvation while reproducing neocolonial extractivism. Against therapeutic withdrawal that privatises suffering and privileged retreat that relies on cultural capital, I argue for ethical withdrawal as shared labor grounded in collective self-alienation and responsibility. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory (Lacan), critical theory (Adorno, Fisher), feminist thought (Berlant, Ahmed), and political philosophy (Foucault, Haraway), I show that withdrawal becomes emancipatory only when it sustains relations of care and accountability – a demanding freedom that emerges through separation, constraint, and place-based commitment.
Shauni De Gussem
LUCA School of Arts, Belgium
Transference Beyond the Clinic: Lacanian Reflections on Teaching Film
This paper examines the structural proximity and divergence between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the practice of teaching screenwriting in higher education film studies. Drawing on Lacan’s concepts of transference, symptom, and signifier, I analyse individual feedback sessions in which students articulate unconscious desire and neurotic structures through their film projects. Whereas psychoanalysis operates through speech, film studies centres on the production of an aesthetic object. I argue that the film project does not merely express the symptom but functions as its motor and obstacle, organising repetition, impasse, and desire within the creative process. This displacement both mobilises and destabilises Lacanian theory. What happens when the symptom is shaped into cinematic form rather than interpreted? What does this reveal about the limits of analytic concepts outside the clinic? By situating the screenwriting teacher at the intersection of two ‘impossible’ professions, this paper proposes a critical dialogue between film studies and Lacanian theory.
Petra Egri, Ph.D.
Hungarian Academy of Arts Research Institute for Art Theory
and Methodology (HAA RIATM)
Dolls, Art, and the Uncanny: Labubu as Fashion Accessory
This paper analyses the global popularity of the Labubu doll as a contemporary cultural phenomenon at the intersection of art, fashion, and popular culture. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny and post-Freudian theories by Hal Foster, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, the paper interprets Labubu as a designer doll that disrupts conventional ideals of childhood innocence and cuteness. Its exaggerated hybrid features and serial collectability evoke repressed childhood memories, ambivalent emotions, and desire. Positioned within the ‘ugly-cute’ aesthetic, Labubu functions as a semiotic and fetishistic object shaped by nostalgia, influencer culture, blind-box marketing, and ‘fear of missing out’. The paper argues that Labubu transforms childhood affect into cultural and social capital within contemporary consumer culture.
Inês Faro
University of Montreal, Canada
Permanent Disquiet as a Clinical Paradigm and a Poetic Operator
This paper examines how ‘permanent disquiet’, understood in Michel de M’Uzan’s (2015) psychoanalytic sense as a constitutive state of psychic openness and instability, operates within contemporary life-writing by women. It argues that disquiet functions as a lived theory shaping both the writing process and the forms of subjectivity that emerge through it. In these texts, disquiet is expressed through textual fragmentation, polyphony, and temporal discontinuity. Permanent disquiet involves the vacillation of identity, the loosening of ego boundaries, and the emergence of a transitional subject. As productive disorganisation, disquiet enables writers to undo inherited models of femininity. This is further clarified by the concept of the ‘other-feminine’, developed by Boisclair and Dussault Frenette (2014), which designates emergent, plural forms of feminine subjectivity. Through dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary life writing, the paper proposes permanent disquiet as both a clinical paradigm and a poetic operator.
Noemi Ford, Psy.D.
University of Pécs, Hungary
Corsets: Women Squeezed to Psychic Death
Marie Kreutzer’s film, Corsage (2022), shows us Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sisi) as the woman of our past and present and not as a romanticised historical figure. With a female screenwriter, director, and photographer, this movie is a first on Sisi that portrays her character from the perspective of the female gaze. In the eternal position of the female, suffocating in her corsage of patriarchal and social oppression, it is not only her flesh that is squeezed but her desire, rage, and agency. Elisabeth’s real tragedy in this movie is not her hysterical symptoms and self-destructive behaviours, which are responses to an internalised male gaze, but her lingering death wish in the form of a radical refusal of captivity, which is too large a price for one’s full subjectivity.
Elizabeth Fox, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
‘You’ve Crossed Over . . . to the World of the Ill’,
a Hematologist / Oncologist Friend Wrote
Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘On Being Ill’, appeared in 1926. Fifty-one years later, Susan Sontag’s book, Illness as Metaphor, came out. These texts drew me after I had a life-threatening event in August, 2025, a century after the fainting and illness that prompted Woolf’s essay. In recovering, I struggled to understand the psychic impact of my massive pulmonary embolism, a near-fatal event requiring intensive care. I felt betrayed by my body, fragile, damaged, and diminished, versus my prior sense of being robust and likely to live beyond my parents’ average age of death, 90. The title of Richard Cohen’s Blindsided: A Reluctant Memoir (2004) attracted me. Cohen’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis at twenty-five and, later, colon cancer contrasts with my less-serious prognosis. However, we share experiences of trauma, anger, and struggle. With these texts and psychoanalytic theory, I explore the psychic impacts of illness and echo Woolf’s call for more attention to it.
Ellis Fox
Cardiff University, UK
Samuel Beckett’s Novel, Molloy, and the
Literature of Narcissistic Rumination
My paper will examine the Freudian concept of secondary narcissism in the work of Samuel Beckett, specifically his 1951 novel, Molloy, and its subsequent depiction of the obsessional symptom of rumination. I will argue that the ‘turning inwards’ of late modernist/postmodern literature apes the process of the libido turning towards the ego as in the case of secondary narcissism, and that, as such, literature becomes self-obsessed, with Molloy providing a prominent example. In doing so, Molloy pays obsessive attention to that which defines it: language, expression, meaning, indeterminacy, and comes to display what Dr. Michael Greenberg would describe as a ‘sensorimotor paradigm’ of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (or Obsessional Neurosis). This frames the common postmodern features of Molloy not merely as historically contingent but as psychologically contingent, developing as a trauma response to World War II and the German occupation of France in 1940.
Rebecca Marcelina Gimeno, Ph.D., CT
Private Practice, USA
The Disrupted Dead: Cemetery Destruction
and Existential-Lifeworld Rupture
Throughout the world, there are cities and towns of the dead. Cemeteries, burial grounds, necropolises, places where the living go to mourn, to tend, to dwell with the dead, to be held within the containing presence of art and aesthetic form. When they are destroyed, something more than a location is lost. The grave is where Being-toward-death is spatialised, where finitude is given a ground, a name, a there. To destroy it is to sever the lived-space, the bodily orientation, the intergenerational transmission, and the communal fabric through which mourning and world-making unfold. The ground of grief gives way. Drawing on existential phenomenology and thanatology, and engaging the work of Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, and Alphonso Lingis, among others, this paper moves through three sites of destruction: Tampa, Aleppo, and Gaza, asking what is undone when the topological conditions of mourning are annihilated, whose dead are the most vulnerable, and what that says about the living. It concludes with Antigone and asks what her question still demands of us.
Annamária Hódosy, Ph.D.
University of Szeged, Hungary
The Ambivalence of Environmental Rhetoric in
Anita Moskát’s Short Story, ‘Your Buds’
The presentation interprets Anita Moskát’s cli-fi short story, ‘Your Buds’ (Rügyeid) through the lens of narrative psychology and the psychology of illness, examining how ecological discourse functions as a palliative meaning-making strategy within a mother–daughter relationship. In a dystopian setting shaped by environmental collapse, a mother reframes her daughter’s illness as interspecies transformation, presenting bodily deterioration as participation in a regenerative vegetal cycle. Her environmental activism thus operates psychologically as a coping mechanism that aestheticises suffering and seeks to secure a positive, meaningful experience of illness for the child. The daughter’s reluctance signals resistance to this redemptive framing. The maternal and nurturing imagery associated with plant life fails to comfort her and instead threatens her sense of autonomy and embodied singularity. The presentation argues that both the mother’s protective narrative and the daughter’s resistant interpretation ultimately diverge from the story’s declared ecological motivations, exposing deeper psychological dynamics beneath environmental rhetoric.
Kyeong Hwangbo, Ph.D.
Wonkwang University, South Korea
The Labor of Surviving: Intellectualisation, Transitional Objects, and Libidinal Reinvestment in Ada Limón’s Poetry Collection, Bright Dead Things
This paper examines Ada Limón’s poetry collection, Bright Dead Things (2015) through a psychoanalytic lens, focusing on the psychic strategies the speaker deploys in the aftermath of loss. Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, Winnicott’s transitional object, and Klein’s depressive position, I trace a negotiated movement from grief toward survival. The speaker’s bureaucratic management of her stepmother’s dying reveals intellectualisation as psychic armour against the unbearable. Certain domestic objects, obsessively repeated, function as transitional anchors holding the self together when the loved one is gone. Yet Limón’s project does not end in survival alone. The speaker’s novelistic reconstruction of her parents’ youth exceeds nostalgia. This imaginative act is a reparative attempt at self-reconstitution: not by forgetting the dead but by weaving them into a forward-moving story of identity.
Kitti Jakobovits
University of Pécs, Hungary
Melancholy in Creative Psychology: An Old-New Perspective
(on the Beat Generation)
In this presentation, I examine the tradition that emphasises melancholy (or melancholia) as the backdrop to artistic creativity. Following Aristotelian and Kristevan concepts of melancholy, I interpret the life experience or existence and art of the Beat Generation. In my presentation, I outline three aspects to approach and explain the statement that Beat’s ‘madness’ can (also) be understood as melancholy: 1) I summarize the descriptions of melancholia by the previously mentioned concepts and compare them with the characteristics of the Beat Generation; 2) I make observations on the semantic similarities that can be found in the characterisation of the Beat generation and melancholy; and 3) I analyse one of the most famous Beat works, the poem ‘Howl’, focusing on where and how melancholy is represented in it.
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.
University at Buffalo (Professor Emerita);
University of California at Berkeley, USA
Mirroring The Self: Memoir Writing As Self-Analysis
A personal memoir is a construction of an identity in language. As such, it is a kind of verbal mirror, a narcissistic performance of a self, reflecting in its language and structure more than the writer knows she knows. My paper will explore the ways in which my writing a memoir turned into a self-analysis that gave me fresh insights into the trajectory of my life. Entitled Nine Lives: My Risky Road from Fifties Rebel to Feminist Critic, its picaresque structure and its recurrent theme of risk and survival led me not only to understand the trajectory of my life as a repetition compulsion that Freud had linked to the death drive, but also to see that compulsion as the consequence of a traumatic primal rage against my beloved parents that could destroy me as well as them. Indeed, writing a memoir doesn’t just record memories; it composes a self through its narrative representations.
Nihan Kaya
University College London, UK
Reading the Text and Reading the Patient
This paper brings Umberto Eco’s theory of interpretation (intentio auctoris, intentio operis, intentio lectoris) into dialogue with Norman Holland’s psychoanalytic reader-response theory by proposing a model of interpretation that is based on three psychologies: the psychology of the reader, the psychology of the text, and the psychology of the author. I suggest that the reader and the text, as well as the author and the text, are ‘both connected and separated’, as in Winnicott’s notion of the paradox. The deeper we realise and take responsibility for the inevitability of our subjectivity in interpretation – of the text or the patient – the greater the possibility that a genuine and fruitful relationship may emerge out of it. Drawing on the interplay between the psychology of the reader, the text, and the author, this paper expands on the link between subjectivity and objectivity, self and otherness, in clinical understanding and creativity.
Yianna Kefala
University of Essex, UK
The Analytic Situation and the Greek Chorus: A Paradigm of Intersubjectivity:
The Aesthetics of the Psychotherapist and the
Patient in the Psychoanalytic Landscape
The analytic situation represents two minds coming together, jointly and asymmetrically entering an intersubjective aesthetic experience. As per Bion, experiences of dreaming create a mutual transcendent / aesthetic functioning in the analytic landscape. The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersubjective third experience in the consulting room and its parallels to the Chorus in ancient Greek theatre. The chorus echoes the emotional content, sometimes slightly modified, inviting the protagonist to enact a movement of transformation. This function of reverberation in the theatre platform epitomises the state of reverie in which the mother-infant dyad follows a rhythm of containment and mirroring. In this process, the echoing of unthinkable emotional experiences between parent and child, or of the patient and therapist, constructs the possibility of thinking, dreaming, and representing.
John Kelley, Ph.D. Camille Archer
Endicott College, USA University College London, UK
A Tale of Two Stories: Applying the Turing Test to Creative Writing
(Co-Authored)
Can AI write short stories that fool people into thinking they were written by humans? Adults (N=308) read two short stories randomly selected from 46 stories, half of which were written by ChatGPT-4 and the other half by professional short story writers. Results showed that some participants were fooled. They thought stories written by AI were actually written by humans, and stories written by humans were actually written by AI. In contrast, other participants could successfully determine whether a story was written by humans or AI. Of particular importance, participants who were fooled thought that AI stories were not simply the equal of human stories; they judged AI stories as more human than human writing. Our results have important implications for the future of creative writing and creative endeavours in general. Human creativity can only flourish if the public retains an appreciation for the idiosyncrasies of the human voice.
Vera Kérchy
University of Szeged, Hungary
Robert Eggers and the Feminine Other
Robert Eggers subverts the horror film that serves the patriarchal unconscious by taking the fantasies that sustain it to extremes. Despite clearly exposing the superstitions of the environment, The Witch (2015) claims that Thomasin is ‘really’ a witch; The Lighthouse (2019) that mermaids really do drive men mad; and The Northman (2022) (despite the well-known Oedipal reading of Hamlet) that the grieving prince’s mother is actually a ‘bitch’. In his 2024 adaptation of Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu, Eggers elevates Ellen Hunt as the main driving force of the events. Unlike the original story, which proved that the accusation of hysteria was unfounded (since the young wife is not struggling with sexual repression but is in the captivity of a demonic force), in Eggers’s version, Orlok arrives (manifests himself) directly in response to Ellen’s (sexual) call, which makes the story interpretable as a Lacanian analysis of the young couple’s love life.
Liz Kim, Ph.D.
Texas A&M University – Kingsville, USA
Id and the Web Environment: Camille Henrot’s
Short Film, Grosse Fatigue
Using a combination of Lacanian and ego psychology, this paper analyses Camille Henrot’s video artwork in her short film, Grosse Fatigue (2013), which emulates the conditions of internet browsing, during which the id becomes hyperactive. Henrot’s work harks back to the idea of encyclopaedic museums, which are nationalist institutions that try to contain all the knowledge of the world as an imperialist project of conquest and categorisation. Her work attempts to displace these ghosts. Rather than picturing the museum, Henrot performs the museum, binding it together with a stitched narrative about the world’s creation myths. She enacts the museum through a unique aesthetic of folder and app windows opening and closing on a desktop, commenting on the encyclopaedic nature of the Internet itself. This work makes apparent that the Internet functions based on the logic of stimulating the id, where libido becomes trapped in the imaginary order, seeking a symbolic release as cathexis.
Filip Kolen
Ghent University, Belgium
Self-Portrait of an Absence: The Subject in the Work of
Visual Artist Mark Manders
Since 1986, Mark Manders has been working on an endless self-portrait. He refers to it as a ‘Self-Portrait as a Building’: each new work may be considered a new room within that structure. In light of this ongoing project, the title of some of his exhibitions – The Absence of Mark Manders – appears paradoxical. Manders’s self-portrait, however, is not an image, nor a representation of the person Mark Manders. In this presentation, I will argue that it is more adequately conceived as a Lacanian subject: present in its absence – or rather, appearing in its disappearance, and disappearing in its appearance. For Lacan, a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier. Manders employs objects as signifiers and arranges them in configurations that give rise to a dialectic in which the subject appears and disappears.
Aino-Maija Lahtinen, Ph.D.
University of Helsinki, Finland
From Perception to Abstraction: Nicolas de Staël’s Practice of Painting
This paper continues my exploration of the French painter Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), whose artistic development I discussed at last year’s PsyArt conference. I now examine de Staël’s painting practice as psychic and physical activity and explore its relationship to his complex character and semi-abstract large, colourful compositions. Drawing on biographical sources and letters he wrote throughout his adult life to family, friends, and figures in the art world, I describe how de Staël’s personal struggles structured his working process and artistic goals. Applying psychologically oriented theories of abstract painting, I show how his striving for inner harmony shaped his approach to abstraction.
Hyun Suk Lee
Private Practice, UK
Contemplating ‘Waiting’ in Psychotherapy and Music
This presentation reframes ‘waiting’ as an actively attentive and containing process in psychotherapy and music. Drawing on Freud, Jung, Winnicott, Bion, and Bergson, I explore waiting as a vital site for meaning-making, underpinned by uncertainty. Through metaphors of ‘auditory waiting’ and ‘temporal containing’ in music and psychotherapy, this paper illustrates how waiting facilitates an authentic expression of inner experience. These theories ground a clinical case study: a community singing group for North Korean refugees that evolved from a 1:1 therapeutic relationship. Through singing and sharing home-cooked meals in the group meetings, our waiting (for the lost home) transforms into a collective experience, integrating adversities into a shared sense of belonging. We learned to revalue ‘waiting’, inherent in any art form, as a transformative tool for deepening therapeutic engagement and fostering community resilience.
Martin Levy
University of Bradford, UK
The ‘Serbian Wizard’ Observed: Trained and ‘Un-Trained’ Perspectives
on the Serbian Philosopher Dimitrije Mitrinovic
In 1927, the Serbian occultist and philosopher Dimitrije Mitrinovic (1887-1953) founded the London branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology (The Adler Society), then, in 1930, The New Europe Group (a pioneering body advocating European federalism). He fascinated (and was followed by) legions of psychiatrists, psychologists, writers, and other intellectuals. Yet today, even the most industrious students of the twentieth-century social sciences struggle to recollect him. Was he a genius ‘for whom only the vast processes of time existed’ (Edwin Muir) or a manipulator and a charlatan? What were the qualities that drew so many intelligent people to the ‘Serbian wizard’ (T.S. Eliot)? In this presentation, I examine Mitrinovic’s image as it appears in private letters, memoirs, and biographies, and highlight his profound influence on the reception of Adler’s individual psychology in Britain.
Terttu Mäkinen, Ph.D.
Private Practice, Finland
On the Border of Vision and Fantasy: Reading Henry James’s Novella,
The Turn of the Screw
This paper examines Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), as a literary exploration of perception, psychic borderline states, and the instability of reality. The novella’s power derives from sustained ambiguity: the governess’s visions oscillate between supernatural apparitions and projections shaped by desire, fear, and repression. Focusing on the first apparition and the unresolved death of Miles, James constructs a narrative space in which vision, interpretation, and fantasy are inseparable. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Shoshana Felman’s notion of reading as ‘acting-out’, the paper suggests that the text implicates the reader in the governess’s interpretive uncertainty. The ghosts can be understood not only as spectral figures but also as traces of trauma and intergenerational transmission. By staging the fragile development of psychic containment and symbolisation, the novella reflects on the formation of internal and external security. Ultimately, James presents reality as a dynamic interplay between perception and imagination, making the reading experience both unsettling and transformative.
Paavo Manninen, Ph.D.
The University of Jyväskylä, Finland
The Primal Scene in Henry James’s Novella, The Turn of the Screw
Published twenty years before Freud’s introduction of the concept of the primal scene in ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), deals with similar primal phantasies and the difference between perception and fantasy that characterise the Wolf Man’s case history. Due to the double-narrative structure and the unreliability of the narrators, interpretative reconstructions of the origin of the story – the past events of the country house before the governess’s arrival – never fully reach James’s poetic effect. By frustrating their desire for knowledge, the classic ghost story leaves the reader an outsider of itself, as it were. Such exclusion from comforting meanings is also likely to happen in the child’s experience of the primal scene. The paper argues that the ambivalence of curiosity and dread, created by James’s poetic effect and literary ‘silence’, is reminiscent of the primal scene.
David McCurdy Stuart-de-Bute
Manukau Institute of Technology, New Zealand
Exorcising Frankenstein Boyfriend: A Gothic–Pūrākau Model
for Women’s Relationship Recovery
This presentation introduces Exorcising Frankenstein Boyfriend, a psychological–literary model for exploring relational patterns in women’s experiences. The ‘Frankenstein Boyfriend’ is an internalised composite figure formed from lived experience, embodied response, protective adaptation, and intergenerational and cultural influences. The term ‘exorcising’ is used metaphorically to describe recognising and transforming these patterns. The model draws on Gothic narrative, including the Linton–Heathcliff dynamic in Wuthering Heights (1847), alongside relational principles informed by pūrākau. Here, the ‘inner’ is understood as relationally constituted through lived experience, not as an isolated psychological space. Structured in relation to Te Whare Tapa Whā, the model recognises relational experience as affecting meaning and connection, internal narrative, embodied response, and relational context. It offers a story-based framework for understanding idealisation and supporting present-focused relationships without impossible comparison.
Xiaoqiao Mu
University of Bristol, UK
On a Hiding to Nowhere: Fantasy within Fantasy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel,
Never Let Me Go
As a clone made for organ donations and denied subjectivity in an exploitative system, the protagonist-narrator Kathy in Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, develops an excessive sense of nostalgia for her childhood boarding school Hailsham as a main coping mechanism to face the horror of her upcoming enforced organ removal and death. Throughout the first-person novel is an unrequited insistence: the line between Hailsham alumni should be ‘unbroken’ due to the love and care they receive from the school guardians. However, the guardians, to whom Kathy turns as the last resort for comfort, don’t really love her – on the contrary, they are ‘all afraid of’ the clones. This paper explores how Kathy’s reiterated act of throwing away and pulling back her ‘memory-reel’ is a compensatory ‘fort-da’ game that downgrades her demand for self-actualisation and progress into her desire to hold onto a past moment that is yet non-existent and deceptive.
Marcie Newton, Ph.D.
University at Albany, USA
Screened Minds: WALL-E, Next Gen, and the Pathology of Comfort on Our Youth
Towards the end of the film, WALL-E (Pixar, 2008), the movie cuts to a scene when WALL-E – the last robot on Earth with the task of cleaning up trash left by humans – becomes a stowaway on a spaceship that houses humans during the cleanup. On the spaceship, WALL-E sees what has become of the human species: obese humans are shuttled around in oversized automated chairs, and all communications and relationships are conducted through screens and virtual reality worlds. No decisions are made beyond superficial needs and wants. More recently, Next Gen (Nima, 2018) depicts a lonely 13-year-old protagonist’s emotional dependence on robots following the death of her father. This might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but these films foreshadowed a future for humankind consumed by corporatocracy and technology addiction. Through an Adlerian psychoanalytical lens, I explore the pathology of comfort on our youth.
Chris Nicholson
University of Essex, UK
From Poetic to Psychoanalytic Space: Agonism in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia
This paper traces the move from the antagonistic to the agonistic in ancient Greek drama, through the introduction of the first, second, and third actor during the early years of Greek democracy. This transition represents a struggle to create internal, psychological space, and to symbolically accommodate and contain conflict. This is an early example of the capacity to maintain the ‘depressive position’ without slipping back into ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, to hold on to dissonance without immediate ‘evacuation’ (a term taken from Bion’s theory of thinking). I illustrate my case with Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. Aeschylus creates space in time, both real and imaginary, by going back to Homer and addressing the intergenerational violence of lex talionis (the law of retribution), and looking forward to democracy. In making this case, I discuss Melanie Klein’s own late reading of The Oresteia.
Ven. Suranjan Ramteke
Buddha Vihar Prabandhak Sangh, India
Conventional Buddhism: ‘Dāna’ in Thai Religious Society
Dāna (giving or generosity) is one of the fundamental preliminary practices in Buddhism and serves as the foundation for generating merit (puñña) or wholesome karma. According to Buddhist teachings, the merit gained through Dāna depends on three important factors: the intention of the donor, the spiritual worthiness of the recipient, and the nature and value of the gift. Therefore, the act of giving should be performed with a pure mind, directed toward worthy recipients and offered according to one’s capacity. Although Buddhism encourages Dāna as a means of realising the selflessness of the giver, the receiver, and the act itself, in contemporary Thai society it often functions as a traditional ritual associated with worldly well-being and prosperity. This paper examines how Dāna has become deeply rooted in Thai daily life and how it continues to maintain a connection between Thai society, the Dhamma (a gift that surpasses all forms of material giving), and the Sangha in an increasingly materialistic age.
Kevin Reside, Ph.D.
The International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Germany
Contingency and Nihilism in the Life of William Stoner
What Richard Rorty admires most in Freud is his recognition of the contingency of selfhood. By conceiving of the self as an assemblage of idiosyncratic experiences and chance encounters, Freud undermines moral prescriptions about how one ought to be and instead makes it possible to construct a multitude of identities. The titular character in John Williams’s novel, Stoner, is certainly a figure of contingency. Without a childhood, William Stoner’s career, goals, and relationships are products of chance. What’s more, Stoner is fully conscious of his life’s fortuity. But rather than set him on a path of playful self-creation or Nietzschean overcoming, as Rorty would expect, Stoner’s awareness paralyses him. He passively slips into a nihilism that eventually kills him. Looking at Stoner, this presentation will build upon Rorty’s argument to claim that if a recognition of contingency is a precondition of a successful psychoanalysis, it cannot be an aim.
Dries Roelandts
Private Practice, Belgium
Viewing the Night’s Moving Images
This paper critically reconsiders the often-unexamined analogy between dreams and cinematic films, focusing on the work of David Lynch and Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalysis (in the tradition of Christian Metz). While Lynch’s films may appear dreamlike and dreams may resemble private films, this comparison obscures crucial structural differences. The intricate processes underlying dream production (Traumarbeit), which Lacan regards as transforming unspeakable material into visual form, differ fundamentally from film production, where preconscious or conscious ideas are shaped into diegetic constructions. Furthermore, the dreamer occupies a dual role as both producer and spectator, a configuration structurally distinct from that of the cinematic subject. The relation of the dreamer–spectator to reality (and to the Lacanian realm of the Real) also demands clarification. Ultimately, I argue that cinema may bear a closer resemblance to daydreaming than to nocturnal dreaming, and that its relation to the unconscious is structurally complex rather than self-evident.
Maria Röell-Kardaun, Ph.D.
Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Herman Hesse’s Novel, Demian, and the Search for Meaning:
A Jungian Perspective
The presentation will focus on the symbolic meaning of the characters and events in Hermann Hesse’s Demian (1919), a novel that closely follows Jung’s model of psychological development. Although the protagonist Emil Sinclair’s individuation proceeds in recognisably Jungian terms, it culminates in strikingly ambiguous imagery: pervasive pain and a dark vision in which he fully identifies with Demian, his ‘friend and Führer’ – ominous signs that hardly suggest a happy ending! My claim is that, even though Jung appreciated Hesse’s Demian as psychologically accurate, a truly happy outcome could never have been expected in an individuation process of this kind: authentic meaning must be sought elsewhere. I will support this view not only by examining Demian itself, but also by drawing on Hesse’s personal life and on other works of his, notably the fairy tale, Iris (1919), and the novel, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930).
Silvia Rondini
University of Barcelona, Spain
On Imagination and Pleasure: The Importance of Subjective Self-Reward
in the Creative Process
Creativity research has conflated imagination with constructs such as divergent thinking, characterising the creative phenomenon based on its products’ external perception. This study assessed Creative Mental Imagery (CMI) as a distinct cognitive process by focusing on the creator’s internal imaginative experience and intrinsic self-reward. 28 Visual Artists and 28 non-artists generated multiple ideas from abstract stimuli before selecting one to draw. After each drawing, they rated their Enjoyment, Satisfaction, and Curiosity during idea generation. Drawings were evaluated by 255 naive raters to produce a Creativity score. Results revealed that generating more ideas predicted higher Enjoyment and Curiosity, with marginally higher Satisfaction and greater Creativity ratings. Moreover, each self-reward measure predicted Creativity, with Satisfaction as the strongest unique predictor. These preliminary findings highlight the strong ties between the self-rewarding dynamics of imagination and external creativity perception, underscoring the necessity of integrating the inner, subjective experience of the creator in creativity paradigms.
Andrew Royle
Private Practice, UK
Performance & Performativity: A Therapeutic Perspective
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argued for ‘performance over competence’. If we take this to mean a live improvisation of difference over a formulaic and traced repetition, then what, if any, is the role for performance in the evidence-based world of ‘competent’ therapeutic psychological practice? In this presentation, I consider the role of performance in the roots of psychoanalysis (particularly Jean Charcot’s work with ‘hysterics’ at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the late 1800s). I will also draw from my work as a dramatherapist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, both in NHS CAMHS services and in private practice. How much must we perform or subvert our roles as patient and clinician? If performativity (as Judith Butler has argued) reveals social laws at play, then to what extent can or must we perform outside the law, disidentifying from proscribed roles to enable work that makes a difference?
Stephen Rudder
University of Essex, UK
Black Men’s Minds
Black Men’s Minds by Quiet Voice is an immersive audio-visual installation remix responding to the disproportionate number of Black men detained in mental health institutions. The piece gives voice to Black men with lived experience, who are often absent from discussions about their care. It draws on visual language from Black men’s creative expressions and a soundtrack that weaves together Black men’s personal testimonies with a score that utilises musical scales derived from the compound frequencies of psychotropic medications. The work functions as a space that holds a stream of consciousness, bearing witness to Black men’s voices and collective experiences, and weaving together reflections on masculinity and power, societal pressures, and the mental health system. In my presentation, I will outline the co-creation process and show a film of the installation. I will then link themes of institutional harm to colonialism and to Frantz Fanon’s concepts of Alienation and Dis-alienation, before linking these to my research on the Black Male Clinical Dyad.
Marissa Sappho Bitton, MSW, BCD-P, CEDS-C
Aurora Center NYC, USA
When the Container Collapses: Dependency, Despair, and the Maternal Psyche
in the Film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
This paper offers a Kleinian–Bionian psychoanalytic reading of the film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), examining maternal overwhelm in the care of a medically fragile child with feeding and eating pathology. Through close analysis of the feeding-tube removal scene and the film’s recurring water imagery, the paper explores failures of containment, attacks on linking, and the collapse of psychic thirdness when the caregiver becomes the sole container. Drawing on Bion’s concept of container–contained, Klein’s paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions, and Meltzer’s notion of early psychic nourishment (‘colostrum’), the film is read as a meditation on unmet dependency and the oscillation between omnipotent repair and psychic drowning. Water functions symbolically as both amniotic refuge and annihilating flood, evoking primitive anxieties around survival and separation. The analysis situates the film within broader psychoanalytic discussions of caregiving, trauma, and eating pathology, illuminating how aesthetic form renders unconscious states of maternal despair, rage, and helplessness visible to the viewer.
Magda Schmukalla, Ph.D.
University of Essex, UK
Public Couch: Interventions Between Art and Psychoanalysis
This paper imagines and theorises a new figure and experience, the Public Couch, by drawing on ideas and events from two sites, public art and the psychoanalytic couch. It does so to better understand a specific type of artistic intervention into affective atmospheres in public places. Neither art therapy nor conventional public artwork, the Public Couch is where and when art in the public space diffracts with the workings of psychoanalysis, allowing for an engagement with unconscious public affects that sit beyond and between individual bodies and minds.
Raluca Soreanu, Ph.D. Monika Perenyei, Ph.D.
University of Essex, UK Hungarian Academy of the Sciences
The Dream Album: The Album of the Angyalföld Museum and the Politics of Presentation of the Asylum in Interwar Budapest (Co-Authored)
In this paper, we explore the conditions of possibility of an unusual photo album, the album of the Angyalföld Museum, assembled in interwar Budapest, as a montage created around life in the asylum. The album is an interdisciplinary, multi-referential, multi-temporal creation, containing a heterogeneous ensemble of elements that hold together in interesting relations. Working collaboratively – an art historian and a psychoanalyst – we named it ‘the Dream Album’, as it is structured like a dream, and it also has the capacity to stimulate free-association. How did this improbable object come about? What are its implications for the politics of the presentation of the asylum and for reimagining the relationship between mental illness, art, and society, but also between society, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis? We start by discussing the theory of montage but also looking at montage as a distinct epistemological orientation, where meaning emerges from the juxtaposition of fragments and in the gaps between fragments.
Graziella Stringos, Ph.D. Mireille Villa, Ph.D.
University of Malta University of Malta
Doomed Beginnings: Brontë’s John Reed and Dickens’s James Steerforth
as Maternal Narcissistic Extensions and Fragmented Selves (Co-Authored)
This paper examines John Reed in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre (1847), and James Steerforth in Charles Dickens’s novel, David Copperfield (1850), through a psychoanalytic lens. Drawing on the theories of Kohut and Kernberg, alongside Lacanian and Kleinian perspectives, the analysis argues that Brontë and Dickens construct these figures not merely as antagonists but as products of their mothers’ emotional failures, becoming ‘narcissistic extensions’ of their mothers’ egos. By comparing the young children’s developmental trajectories, the paper highlights how opposite forms of maternal dysfunction – whether through excessive adoration or emotional abandonment – can produce devastating outcomes. Ultimately, the study argues that Reed and Steerforth serve as narrative case studies of the consequences of distorted maternal influence, revealing how the shaping of the child’s ego can lead to adult lives marked by harm, instability, and tragedy. Their stories underscore the novels’ shared critique of parenting practices that prioritise social status or personal projection over genuine emotional nurture.
Bertalan Balázs Sütő
University of Pécs, Hungary
Transitional Space as a Transitional Conception: The Basis of Creativity, Transformation, Transcendence, and Religion
In the history of psychoanalysis and its derivatives, the most productive concepts organically outgrow their original context. D. W. Winnicott’s notion of transitional space is a prime example: beyond describing children’s play, it fundamentally explains the psychological functioning behind creativity, culture, and transcendence. Through unique paths of theoretical enrichment, this concept also becomes a ‘transitional entity’ bridging subjective experience and objective reality. Winnicott’s contemporary, Marion Milner, explored this space through painting, where creativity and the inner and outer worlds meaningfully meet (On Not Being Able to Paint). For Christopher Bollas, it is the locus for unfolding the unique human idiom and the possibility of transformation. Furthermore, the transitional space became an underpinning of Ana-Maria Rizzuto’s research on the psychodynamic formation of the God representation. Ultimately, transitional space is more than a metapsychological construct; it is an indispensable bridge connecting early childhood to adult life, and metapsychology to perceptible reality.
Nicolas Terrie
University of Ghent, Belgium
‘Sin of Self-Love Possesseth All Mine Eye’: A Freudian Reading of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62
Freud claimed that the eye is the erogenous zone furthest removed from the sexual object, from that which is ‘fitted to make satisfaction possible’. Unlike the oral and anal drives, the object of the scopophilic drive does not coincide with its source, the eye; it always points to something other than itself. Its first object, however, is of the organism’s own bodily movements. The neonate ‘sees’ only itself; the eye is unable to tell the difference between hallucination and perception. To do so and continue loving itself, the eye occasions the organism to love itself outside of itself. Using Augustine’s conception of original sin to appreciate how narcissism is the result of a ‘Fall outside of oneself’, I aim to show why Shakespeare – whose Sonnet 62 begins by saying that the ‘sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye’ – is right in claiming that ‘for this sin, there is no remedy’.
Patricia Townsend, Ph.D.
Independent Researcher, UK
Christopher Bollas and the Creative Process: Psychic Genera
Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst in the Independent tradition who has written extensively about creativity. At the PsyArt conference in 2025, I spoke about Bollas’s theory of the transformational object. This year, I will focus on his theory of psychic genera and explore how it sheds light on the way in which new ideas for artworks emerge in an artist’s mind. I will relate this to the experiences of some of the visual artists I have interviewed and to my own process of creating a new book, Bridging Time 1944-2044: Letters to My Father, which combines poetry and visual art.
Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Ph.D.
University of Ghent, Belgium
The Audacity of Non-Decision
Lacan’s formulae of sexuation have been discussed extensively, primarily within psychoanalytic and Lacanian circles. Drawing on these formulae, I propose to examine the significance of the distinctions between substance and attribute, subject and predicate, function and object, and to articulate, in these terms, the question of sexuation in relation to what it means to occupy the ‘phallic’ side or the ‘other’ side. If there is one message I take from Lacan, it is that the logical differences implied by these two sides are, first and foremost, determinative of the ways in which groups and classes are formed – and of how one acts accordingly. In this presentation, I argue for the audacity of non-decision, or the courage to remain undecided, as a position faithful to the ‘other’ logic, and I explore a number of its structural implications.
Alexandra Van Laeken
University of Ghent, Belgium
A Window of One’s Own: Creating Difference Through Distance
In Le Spleen de Paris (1869), Baudelaire introduces the ‘flaneur’, a character who wanders through the streets of Paris. Through various windows, he frames the world as if it were paintings. In doing so, he becomes both artist and spectator at once. The motif of the window recalls the romantic principle following which ‘everything at a distance turns into poetry’ (Novalis, 1798). In his short story, ‘Through the Window’ (1894), H.G. Wells morally questions this: how is the subject implied when life is put at a distance? Within psychoanalysis, the window reappears as a recurring reference – from Gérard Wajcman’s essay, ‘Fenêtre: Chroniques du Regard et de L’intime’ (2004) to Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (1962-63) – where it functions as a structural device that frames fantasy. Building on these references, I propose a reconceptualisation of the notion of ‘distance’ as that which gives expression to a difference. In doing so, the psychoanalytic reading reveals its political significance.
Allison Vanouse
County College of Morris, USA
Lav Diaz’s Season of the Devil and the Rhetoric of Traumatic Realism
According to John Eldridge in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (2014), ‘Art that enacts the real as a scene of trauma can be powerful and acutely insightful’. If, as good readers of Lacan, we define the real in terms of trauma, this reads almost as a truism. Yet, it is intended to be historically specific, a synthesis of influential arguments on conceptual art near the turn of the twenty-first century, derived from Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real (1996). My paper questions the outcomes of using this genre of Lacanian pathos as a rhetorical tool within a fundamentally trend-driven art market. How do psychoanalytic readers cope with the idea that art can represent real trauma while failing to be powerful and insightful? The investigation develops around a reading of Lav Diaz’s film, Season of the Devil (2018), a black-and-white Capella musical about traumatic experiences under martial law in the Philippines c. 1973.
Donald Vanouse, Ph.D.
SUNY Oswego, USA
Harry Belafonte’s Memoir My Song and Psychoanalysis
This paper is about Harry Belafonte’s My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance (2011), which reports his careers as a folksinger, an actor on film and stage, an activist supporting Martin Luther King, and co-ordinating musical events that enabled world-wide groups of artists to express their commitments to political and cultural values and to world-wide problems such as famine and oppression. For example, ‘We are the World’ was a collective effort to ease a world suffering, and the ‘Live Aid’ concert in which he performed was said to have provided ‘the largest famine relief’ effort ever organised by musicians and performers. Also, Belafonte’s My Song reports on fifty years of psychoanalytic counseling. Psychoanalysis enabled him to examine childhood conflicts, his resistance to racial discrimination, and his artistic ambitions. This memoir is appropriately dedicated to Belafonte’s mother, who enabled him throughout his life to remember the blighting effects of racism and social and economic injustice in the lives of the poor.
Luis Vega
University of Ghent, Belgium
Listen to Me, My Love: The Invocatory Drive and Instrumental Music
In Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (1962-63), Lacan introduced the gaze and the voice as objects of the drive. While Lacanian scholarship has extensively theorised the scopophilic drive (gaze), the invocatory drive (voice) remains underexplored, despite being the only one driven by the fantasy of revealing and submitting to the Other’s desire. To resolve this enigma, this presentation approaches the invocatory drive, not through the superegoic injunction to obey the law but through instrumental music. Precisely because instrumental music lacks semantic meaning, it draws the subject into listening for what is not yet present in discourse, rendering the subject obedient to nonsense. Listening to instrumental music reveals how the invocatory drive seeks the Other’s desire by taking a leap of faith into the unknown. Henceforth, this aesthetic experience offers an intuitive model to conceptualise how the invocatory drive revolves around the voice, as it stands for the lack in Lacanian discourse.
Alexander Venétis
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
What is ‘Difference’? A Re-Evaluation of a Concept
Widely Used Yet Poorly Understood
This paper argues that the concept of ‘difference’ needs to be re-examined. Its widespread use suggests that, with notable exceptions, ‘difference’ simply means equivalent, or nearly equivalent, to the concept of ‘distinction’. I argue that this is a major error – a fallacy that recurs perpetually in academic discussions and appears to be largely confined to that context (cf. the colloquial phrase ‘distinctions without differences’). At last year’s PsyArt conference, I argued that the Lacanian edifice, solely by dint of the Real, is incompatible with academic philosophy, including its poststructuralist variants. At a minimum, the Real is ‘difference as difference without there being entities of which it is their difference’ (Žižek). That is, the Real equals absolute difference. Recognizing that ‘difference’ and ‘distinction’ are truly different, i.e., absolute and relative respectively, Lacan exposes the view that all differences are merely relative as a major error of judgement, the consequences of which are far-reaching and deleterious. I shall briefly exemplify my case by contrasting Lacanian sexual difference with a poststructuralist perspective (e.g., Butler).
Reshma Vinayan Subha
University of Essex, UK
Reimagining the Crypt: Where Memory Is Generative
The concept of the crypt is fascinating: a trace of a past that is no longer present – an absence. Despite its deconstructive framework, it is often imagined as a vessel with buried memories and traumas – and yet, connotes an emptiness. This emptiness is epistemically enforced. The conceptualisation of the crypt evolved mainly through Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida, and Bracha Ettinger’s concept of transcryptum. While I trace the crypt through these theoretical avenues, I agree with the Derridean position that the crypt is not just existing as a static absence but is constantly leaking significations. My aim is two-fold: 1) to establish the crypt as a fluid form that shifts meaning and signification to afford a generative understanding of memory than not look at it at all because of a perceived absence; and 2) to reimagine the crypt as an amorphous and dynamic vessel that assumes any shape depending on its immediate context, which I exemplify through cultural objects like folklore images.
Genevieve Wearne
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia
Woman on Fire: Sweating out a Language of Subjectivity Through
the Repeated Act of Self-Portraiture
This practice-led research draws on Virginia Woolf’s novel, A Room of One’s Own (1929), as a companion piece and departure point for narration in visual portraits and as an inspiration for the artist to explore the archaeology of their unstable identity notions of self through portraiture and visual memoir. Working predominantly in oils, experimental visual shorthand painterly techniques of layering and erasure reveal and disguise aspects of the self. In the language of psychoanalysis, this painterly research uses the methods of mirroring, repetition, and rupture to disrupt and reintegrate personal narratives. Inspired by figurative painters Joan Semmell and Jenny Saville, and performance-based narrative works of photographers Sophie Calle and Cindy Sherman, the creation of large-scale mixed-media narrative works that appropriate the literary tradition of memoir – centred on relationships and their role in shaping and reshaping our perceptions of self from childhood – is also explored. By working through the artefacts of self and offering the self to an audience, this research aims to simulate a new site for healing and connection.
Ákos Windhager, Ph.D.
Hungarian Academy of Arts Research Institute for Art Theory
and Methodology (HAA RIATM)
Bruegel, Maeterlinck and Ligeti: Bartlett’s Memory Distortions
in a Shoah-Trauma Project
The composer György Ligeti (1923-2007) lost his father and brother in the Shoah, fled Hungary in 1956, and spent decades processing accumulated trauma through his compositions. His anti-anti-opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-77) represents the culmination of this artistic memory-work. This paper analyses the opera through Frederic Bartlett’s seven mechanisms of reconstructive memory: emphasis shift (personal loss → universal apocalypse), emotional transformation (horror → grotesque humour), temporal condensation (1944 → timeless Brueghelland), coherence-building (fragmentary trauma → operatic narrative), conventionalisation (Shoah → Western apocalyptic tradition), and detail omission (specific victims → allegorical figures). Jan Assmann’s framework reveals how Ligeti transforms communicative memory into cultural memory through Bruegel’s iconography and Maeterlinck’s absurd play. The opera’s central character Piet – ‘naive and forgiving’ because he cannot remember – demonstrates that this grotesque masterpiece functions not as simple trauma processing but as sophisticated survivor testimony, relevant to Marilyn Charles’s research on creativity and intergenerational trauma transmission.
Ewa Winkler
Independent Researcher, Poland
Myth, Symbol, and Individuation: Bolesław Biegas’s Art Interpreted
Through Jungian Psychology
Bolesław Biegas (1877–1954) offers a compelling case for Jungian interpretation, particularly through the lens of individuation. His biography – shaped by a difficult rural childhood, self-taught artistic beginnings, and eventual relocation to Paris – reflects an archetypal path from disintegration toward psychic wholeness. Biegas’s deliberate move away from academic norms and his embrace of visionary expression align with the broader artistic trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and early Modernism, all of which sought to penetrate the spiritual and psychological dimensions of experience. His hybrid figures, cosmic compositions, and mythic narratives can be read as visualisations of archetypes central to Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, such as the shadow, anima, and the self. Within this biographical and symbolic tapestry, Biegas appears as a seeker who became both vessel and voice of archetypal energies, transmuting his own path into a modernist legend of inner awakening – an echo from the past now returning to the world’s attention like a rediscovered star.
Deborah Wright, Ph.D.
University of Essex, UK
A ‘Home’ in Wivenhoe Park in Art and Words
In this presentation, I will present my new artwork, conceptualisations, and responses relating to this ‘site’ of Wivenhoe Park (the ‘site’ of this conference). As an artist, academic, researcher and psychotherapist, I respond in multiple ways to what I suggest is a multi-layered and complex site, but that we could also say is a case study ‘snapshot’ of sites anywhere. This presentation will focus on four periods of this Wivenhoe Park ‘site’: Neolithic; Bronze Age –with the Bronze Age burial mounds on the site – the 18th Century landscaping and ‘sequestering’ of the ‘Park’ shape and space during the Period of ‘Wivenhoe House’ being built, and the famous Constable Painting ‘Wivenhoe Park, Essex’ (1816); the 1960s utilisation of the site by the University of Essex, with the building layout and meaning creation during that period, which takes us to the present and future of the ‘site’.
Chi-Yan Yeung
University of Essex, UK
Mind-Body Integration through Margaret Tilly’s Jungian Music Therapy
Sound evolved from primitive utterances into rhythm and eventually into language and music, the earliest forms of human communication. The transformative power of sound in shaping emotion has been recognised since ancient times. Today, however, evidence-based therapy often remains limited in addressing individual experience and the cultural meaning of music for each patient. This presentation explores Jungian music therapy in the 1950s through my current archival findings on the meeting between music therapist Margaret Tilly and psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1956. Focusing on their exchange, the presentation examines the patient-centred foundations of early music therapy and its integration of music and psychology. By revisiting this pivotal historical moment, the study highlights how Jungian approaches connected ancient understandings of sound and healing with modern therapeutic practice. In so doing, it identifies key principles of early music therapy and opens new directions for academic discussion on music, culture, and psychological healing.
Sheida Zokaeieh
Private Practice, UK
The Role of Art in an Age of Liminality
One of the pervasive yet insufficiently articulated phenomena of modern life is liminality. Far from being a brief passage between stable states, liminality has become a structural condition of contemporary existence. Rapid social change, precarious identities, technological acceleration, and unstable futures produce a persistent sense of suspension. In such conditions, individuals may experience forms of nameless anxiety and diffuse trauma that are difficult to locate or symbolise. The ground feels uncertain; continuity is disrupted. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this intensification of liminal space can overwhelm the mind’s capacity to transform emotional experience into thought. Drawing on Bion’s understanding of dreaming as a psychic function that metabolises raw experience, I explore how art may intervene in this condition. Rather than eliminating liminality, artistic practice can modulate its intensity, shifting it from a paralysing threshold to a liminoid space of play, creativity, and symbol formation. In doing so, art opens a potential space in which dreaming can resume and psychic movement becomes possible.