Spring Meeting Announcements Poster submissions now being accepted until December 5, 2025: Posters can include presentations of quantitative and/or qualitative research with empirical relevance to advancing any area of psychoanalytic treatment or theory. Poster proposals will be evaluated by the Division 39 Research Committee, and decisions will be sent via email in mid-January. NOTE: Submissions should not exceed 500 words, and should include the aims of the research, a description of the procedure including the sample, instruments used, any statistical procedures, and findings to date. Priority will be given to research with completed analyses, rather than proposed studies. The two highest ranking posters from a trainee or Early Career Professional (ECP) will be selected as SPPP Scholars. Acceptances will be emailed in January 2026. (There are 73 scholars selected annually by the various components of SPPP.) The conference will be held in-person from April 22-25, 2026. Sessions on April 23-25 will be at the Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York City. If your poster is accepted you will be expected to present your poster in person on the designated date.
Jim Sexton Chair of the Division 39 Poster Session helen DeVinney & Brianna Suslovic Conference Co-Chairs Stephen Anen & Nicholas DiCarlo Program Chairs
| April 22-25, 2026
Hilton Midtown, New York City Next Up: Abstract reviews are in progress - Accepted proposals will be notified later this year. Poster Submissions open now! (Deadline 12/5/25): |
Call for Proposals
The conference organizers of the 45th Annual Spring Meeting for the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39 of the APA are pleased to invite you to submit proposals to the 2026 conference theme:institutional life:reclaiming life from institutions
This conference invites us to critically consider how we participate in the discipline of psychoanalysis–and how the discipline of psychoanalysis disciplines us. Together we will consider the analytic implications of what is referred to as “institutional life.”
As a field that relies on institutions to transmit knowledge, teach our theory, and grow a community, we see being part of institutions as necessary or innocuous or even - respectable; that psychoanalysis is a part of larger institutions and has its own institutions legitimizes psychoanalysis. But at what cost? How often do we confront who these institutions answer to, the way we conform or adapt our theory to avoid disruption, and what we give up (and ask those who seek to train or study with us to give up) to be a part of them?
As a profession concerned with containment, repression, displacement, and identification, how do these processes show themselves within the institutional unconscious of our universities, training programs, hospitals, clinics, and institutes? How do we stay attuned to and curious about the institutional processes that are withheld from being conscious? And how do we ask ourselves to both see and resist the urge to align our own unconscious processes and identities with the unconscious processes and public-facing identity of the institution?
How do we maintain a stance of claiming/reclaiming life within institutions, when the very nature of an institution is to pressure the community that enlivens it to conform to its values and codes (values and codes that are often only expressed through actions, inactions, and discipline and that are at odds with its publicly stated missions, purposes, and values)? We ask how or what would be necessary to make or reclaim lives while working in institutions when often the institution itself is focused on its own longevity, not the vitality and expansiveness of its community members/laborers.
We invite you to reflect and share about the ways we minimize or deny the waywe become institutionalized. Through an investment in psychoanalyzing systems, structures, and clarity about our own collusion in the desire for power and legitimacy that is shored up by institutions, this conference hones in on the conscious and unconscious institutional processes that place constraints on ourselves, our colleagues, our neighbors, and our patients.
Additionally, we hope to confront within ourselves the allure and seduction of institutions, to make visible what we are seeking, elevating, exclusivizing, and erasing when we unconsciously seek to be absorbed into a system so as to maintain its homeostasis.
With emphasis on the present-day processes of state repression, university enclosure, transnational displacement, and creeping and normalizing of carceral containment under the guise of safety and security, this conference locates the institutional and the interpersonal at the center of our psychoanalytic concern and curiosity.
We eagerly invite psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary engagements and critiques related to institutionality; colonization; complaint; silences and silencing; complicity and capitulation; captivation; violence and violation; boundaries; enclosure; alienation; entanglement; experiments; embodiment; abandonment; grief; the elsewhere/otherwise; the commons/undercommons; carcerality; subaltern counterpublics; punks; deviants; street art; graffiti; taking up public space; lovers in the park; neodada and dada – all that undergirds institutional life: reclaiming life from institutions.
We look forward to submissions that weave together the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and institutional, as well as submissions that divest from the conventional conference session format; workshops, somatic-centered sessions, facilitated experiences, and thematic/unstructured/participatory conversations are invited, among other formats.
