Note from the Conference Chair: The call for submissions is being sent out on Nakba Day, carrying on the tradition of last year’s call. This year commemorates the 78th anniversary of the Nakba of 1948––an event of mass killing, disablement, and dispossession of the Palestinian people of their homeland. Our committee stands in opposition to the ongoing ethnic cleansing and displacement in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and SWANA region through Israel-US military force. As we invite you all to think about the power of language and narrative-building, we encourage you to reflect critically on the ways on the ways language situates us in subject and object positionality.
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The conference organizers of the 46th 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 2027 conference theme: The Power of Tongues
“Mastery of language affords remarkable power. ”
Fanon (1952), Black Skin, White Masks
Freud regarded free (spoken) association as imperative to psychoanalysis, premised on the condition that one understands oneself by seeing themselves reflected on the other—language being the medium through which this process happens. Narrative coherence thus became privileged as evidence of psychic interiority. Later, Ferenczi’s attention to enactments complicated this view, suggesting that what emerges between therapist and patient—relational and political—is equally revelatory in the understanding of oneself as subject. Lacan and Fanon further extend this work by theorizing speech as a site through which sociopolitical forces infiltrate psychic life and the analysis.
If language has been understood as the foundation upon which psychoanalysis is situated, what happens when that foundation trembles? When words do not simply reveal and create, but press upon, constrain, or fail. When speech does not arrive organized, but sticks in the throat, circulates through the body, or returns as something else?
Speech and language foregrounding psychoanalytic work invites us to consider language not solely as ancillary to analytic practice, but as constitutive of it. Opening ourselves up in this way allows us to encounter language where it takes form as and when it acts as an atmosphere; a pressure system; a set of conditions that shape what can be sensed, said, and survived. It constructs realities and disciplines what counts as legible, normative, or worthy of care—often before we are able to name its vigor.
Building from this, we invite an attunement to how particular forms of violence emerge when language’s impact is negated. Such violence often remains invisible precisely because it operates under the guise of normality, neutrality, and care. What are the words that haunt us? Which ones do we inherit and which ones does the body refuse?
How might psychoanalytic and critical traditions attend to this constitutive violence of language constellated in infrastructure through patterns of speech and rhythms of everyday life––without retreating into silence, relativism, or grandstanding betrayed in enunciation? How are we bound within discursive webs that shape not only what our words mean, but what our bodies can register, assert, or withhold? How do these bindings shift between languages—when the mother tongue no longer promises our legibility or is no longer legible itself?
Grounded in psychoanalytic thinking, this conference lingers with how language can both produce and constrain subjectivity––how it has the power to richly generate worlds AND flatten complexity and foreclose refusal. Narratives that become dominant—across settler colonial, institutional, psychiatric, educational, and carceral systems—are sustained through shared lexicons that demand coherence, dictate recognition, and stabilize oppression. And yet, something persists beyond their terms.
We are interested in this excess. In refusal not only as withdrawal, but as pressure, as interruption, as a re-routing. In the moments where coherence falters, where what was fixed is allowed to loosen and shift, where the demand to be understood is met with silence, distortion, or another kind of utterance altogether. We welcome work that calls bodies back into presence and interrupts what has been rendered unsayable—language as vital practice that resuscitates rather than explains, that asserts rather than contorts, that brings bodies into relation rather than enclosing them within fastened identities.
This conference warmly invites psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary engagements and critiques of language as it relates to, but is not limited to: development; embodiment; linguistics; culture; translation; colonial domination; imperialism; westernization; lexical warfare; psychic intrusion and disorientation; (dis)ability; capitalism; neoliberalism; social and economic class/mobility; white supremacy; proximity to whiteness; intelligibility; race; gender; sexuality; age; feminist studies; madnesss; critical race theory; linguistic hierarchies; citizenship; nationality; ethnicity; campism; religious affiliation; institutions; genocide, ethnic cleansing; carcerality; psychiatrization; medicalization; eugenics; power; structural violence; capitulation and refusal.
Our conference will take place online from April 14-17, 2027. All sessions will include live ASL interpretation. During registration, participants may indicate whether they require spoken language translation support or wish to offer such translation support.
We look forward to submissions that depart from the conventional conference session format; workshops, somatic-centered, facilitated experiences, conversational and participatory, multilingual, art/musically based, non-English, deaf and/or hard of hearing, among other formats. We eagerly anticipate your participation and look forward to being together next April.
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The submission portal will open on June 15, 2026. Our committee will be holding a few connection and collaboration spaces via Zoom in the next few weeks to facilitate partnership and make ourselves available for questions. Those meetings will be held on the following dates:
