| Note from the co-chairs: We are sending our call for submissions out on Nakba Day, a day commemorating the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1948. The Nakba refers to the mass killing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. On this day of remembrance and mourning, we want to call attention to the Israeli government’s suppression of an annual Nakba Day march in the village of Kafr Sabt amidst what some have begun to call the second Nakba: the ongoing siege, suffocation, starvation, and genocidal catastrophe in Gaza, facilitated by the government of the United States. As we think about our positions within institutions, we invite you to reflect critically on the role of governments and institutions in facilitating mass harm, and the role of our professional community in responding to mass harm.–“I find it quite pleasant to pass from one atmosphere to another through crossing a border. We need to put an end to the idea of a border that defends and prevents. Borders must be permeable; they must not be weapons against migration or immigration processes.”—Édouard Glissant in One World in Relation The conference organizers of the 45th Annual Spring Meeting for the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39 of the APA are pleased to invite you to submit proposals to the 2026 conference theme: This conference invites us to critically consider how we participate in the discipline of psychoanalysis–and how the discipline of psychoanalysis disciplines us. Together we will consider the analytic implications of what is referred to as “institutional life.” As a field that relies on institutions to transmit knowledge, teach our theory, and grow a community, we see being part of institutions as necessary or innocuous or even – respectable; that psychoanalysis is a part of larger institutions and has its own institutions legitimizes psychoanalysis. But at what cost? How often do we confront who these institutions answer to, the way we conform or adapt our theory to avoid disruption, and what we give up (and ask those who seek to train or study with us to give up) to be a part of them? As a profession concerned with containment, repression, displacement, and identification, how do these processes show themselves within the institutional unconscious of our universities, training programs, hospitals, clinics, and institutes? How do we stay attuned to and curious about the institutional processes that are withheld from being conscious? And how do we ask ourselves to both see and resist the urge to align our own unconscious processes and identities with the unconscious processes and public-facing identity of the institution? How do we maintain a stance of claiming/reclaiming life within institutions, when the very nature of an institution is to pressure the community that enlivens it to conform to its values and codes (values and codes that are often only expressed through actions, inactions, and discipline and that are at odds with its publicly stated missions, purposes, and values)? We ask how or what would be necessary to make or reclaim lives while working in institutions when often the institution itself is focused on its own longevity, not the vitality and expansiveness of its community members/laborers. We invite you to reflect and share about the ways we minimize or deny the way we become institutionalized. Through an investment in psychoanalyzing systems, structures, and clarity about our own collusion in the desire for power and legitimacy that is shored up by institutions, this conference hones in on the conscious and unconscious institutional processes that place constraints on ourselves, our colleagues, our neighbors, and our patients. Additionally, we hope to confront within ourselves the allure and seduction of institutions, to make visible what we are seeking, elevating, exclusivizing, and erasing when we unconsciously seek to be absorbed into a system so as to maintain its homeostasis.With emphasis on the present-day processes of state repression, university enclosure, transnational displacement, and creeping and normalizing of carceral containment under the guise of safety and security, this conference locates the institutional and the interpersonal at the center of our psychoanalytic concern and curiosity. We eagerly invite psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary engagements and critiques related to institutionality; colonization; complaint; silences and silencing; complicity and capitulation; captivation; violence and violation; boundaries; enclosure; alienation; entanglement; experiments; embodiment; abandonment; grief; the elsewhere/otherwise; the commons/undercommons; carcerality; subaltern counterpublics; punks; deviants; street art; graffiti; taking up public space; lovers in the park; neodada and dada – all that undergirds These will be held during the following times: May 21st, 8:30-9:30pm EST/7:30-8:30pm CST/6:30-7:30pm MST/5:30-6:30pm PSTMay 29th, 12-1pm EST/11am-12pm CST/10-11am MST/9-10am PSTJune 5th, 11am-12pm EST/10-11am CST/9-10am MST/8-9am PST These spaces are intended to facilitate connection with others who are submitting and to make ourselves available to answer questions. You can register for these at https://linktr.ee/div39_2026. The submission portal will be opened after these sessions! “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”― Arundhati Roy Our conference will be held in-person from April 22-25, 2026 at the Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York City. See you there. helen DeVinney & Brianna Suslovic Conference Co-Chairs 2026div39@gmail.com |
Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 
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