Where is the conference being held?

The conference is scheduled to take place in Buenos Aires, ARG.

What is the primary focus of the conference?

The conference focuses on contemporary issues and advancements in psychoanalysis, with a specific emphasis on the theories of Jacques Lacan.

When will the conference occur?

The conference is scheduled for two days in February.

ICPL 2027: 21. International Conference on Psychoanalysis and Lacan

Name: ICPL 2027: 21. International Conference on Psychoanalysis and Lacan
Start: 2027-02-25T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-02-26T00:00:00Z
Location: Buenos Aires

Feb 25–26, 2027Buenos Aires, ArgentinaIn-person

Registration open

The International Conference on Psychoanalysis and Lacan (ICPL) is an academic event dedicated to exploring contemporary issues and advancements in psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on the theories of Jacques Lacan. This iteration of the conference offers a platform for researchers, academics, and practitioners to present their work, engage in scholarly discourse, and foster collaborations within the field. Held in Buenos Aires, ARG, the conference aims to contribute to the ongoing development and application of psychoanalytic thought in various contexts.

Committees & topics

Topics
Psychoanalysis: Origins, Schisms, and Contemporary Standing · Jacques Lacan and the Return to Freud · Language and the Structure of the Unconscious · Repression: From Freudian Foundations to Contemporary Critiques · Sexuality in Psychoanalytic Theory · The Self: Psychoanalytic and Cross-Theoretical Conceptions · The Oedipus Complex: Formulation, Revision, and Critique · Dream Interpretation in Psychoanalysis

Why it matters

The continued study and application of psychoanalysis, particularly through the lens of Lacanian theory, holds significant relevance for understanding human behavior, societal structures, and international relations. Concepts derived from psychoanalysis can offer unique perspectives on motivations behind political actions, cultural dynamics, and even the formation of national identities. For diplomats and policy makers, an understanding of these underlying psychological frameworks can be crucial for effective negotiation, conflict resolution, and the development of nuanced foreign policy.

Furthermore, the conference's location in Buenos Aires, ARG, is notable given the strong historical and contemporary presence of psychoanalysis in the region. This geographical context enriches the discussions by bringing in diverse cultural perspectives and experiences regarding the practice and theoretical evolution of psychoanalysis. The exchange of ideas at such an event can illuminate how psychoanalytic concepts are interpreted and applied across different cultural landscapes, offering valuable insights into global intellectual trends and their potential impact on diplomatic strategies and cross-cultural communication.

How to prepare

For those engaging with the themes of the ICPL, a strong foundation in the core tenets of psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory is essential. This includes familiarity with key concepts such as the unconscious, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, as well as Lacan's reinterpretation of Freudian ideas. Understanding the historical development of these theories and their various schools of thought will enable participants to critically engage with the presentations and discussions.

Beyond theoretical knowledge, considering the practical implications of psychoanalytic thought for international relations and diplomacy can enhance one's preparation. Exploring how concepts like identity formation, desire, and the role of language, as understood through a Lacanian framework, might influence state-to-state interactions or the dynamics within international organizations could be particularly fruitful. This approach allows for a deeper appreciation of the conference's potential contributions to interdisciplinary understanding and strategic thinking.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Argentina

A significant hub for psychoanalytic thought and practice, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Role in topic

ARG has a rich history and a strong contemporary presence in the field of psychoanalysis, with a notable emphasis on Lacanian theory. The city of Buenos Aires is often considered a global center for psychoanalytic studies, hosting numerous institutes and practitioners. This context provides a unique and fertile ground for the conference, drawing upon a deep local intellectual tradition and offering a distinct cultural lens through which to explore the topics.

France

The origin country of Jacques Lacan and a foundational center for Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Role in topic

FRA is the birthplace of Jacques Lacan and the primary intellectual origin of Lacanian psychoanalysis. French scholars and institutions have played a pivotal role in developing, disseminating, and debating Lacan's work globally. The ongoing engagement of French academics and practitioners with Lacanian theory continues to shape its evolution and influence, making their perspective central to any international discussion on the subject.

United Kingdom

A historical center for psychoanalysis, with diverse schools of thought, including engagement with Lacanian ideas.

Role in topic

The GBR has a long and influential history in psychoanalysis, particularly through figures like Melanie Klein and the British Object Relations school. While not exclusively Lacanian, British psychoanalytic circles have engaged with and critically responded to Lacan's work, contributing to a broader and more diverse intellectual landscape within the field. Their perspectives often highlight comparative analyses and theoretical integrations.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Psychoanalysis: Origins, Schisms, and Contemporary Standing

Psychoanalysis emerged in late nineteenth-century Vienna through the clinical and theoretical work of Sigmund Freud, who built on earlier studies of hysteria with Josef Breuer and on the Parisian neurology of Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud's foundational texts, including The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and the metapsychological papers of the 1910s, established a model of the mind organized around the unconscious, drives, defense, and transference. The International Psychoanalytical Association, founded in 1910, institutionalized training but quickly fractured, first with Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, and later through successive theoretical schisms involving Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and the British Object Relations school. During the twentieth century psychoanalysis spread unevenly: it took deep institutional root in the United States through ego psychology, in Britain through Kleinian and Independent traditions, in France through the Lacanian return to Freud, and in Argentina and Brazil through strong clinical communities. The discipline weathered Nazi persecution, which scattered analysts across Europe and the Americas, and later faced sharp challenges from biological psychiatry, behavioral therapies, and evidence-based medicine that questioned its empirical claims. Today psychoanalysis persists as a clinical practice, a research tradition, and a framework for cultural and political critique, even as it has lost ground in mainstream mental health care. Debates concern its compatibility with neuroscience, the regulation of training institutes, its place in public health systems, and the continuing relevance of Freudian and post-Freudian categories to questions of subjectivity, trauma, and social bonds.

Key players

Jacques Lacan and the Return to Freud

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose work reshaped the field through what he called a return to Freud. Trained in French clinical psychiatry, Lacan began publishing in the 1930s, including his thesis on paranoia and the influential 1936/1949 paper on the mirror stage. From 1953, his Rome Discourse inaugurated a systematic re-reading of Freud through structural linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson), structural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), and Hegelian and Heideggerian philosophy, summed up in formulas such as the unconscious is structured like a language. Lacan's institutional trajectory was turbulent. His use of variable-length sessions and his unorthodox training practices led to repeated conflicts with the International Psychoanalytical Association, culminating in his 1963 excommunication. He founded the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964, dissolved it in 1980, and his heirs created competing associations, most prominently the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis under Jacques-Alain Miller. His weekly Seminar, delivered from 1953 to 1980, became the primary vehicle of his teaching and continues to be edited and published posthumously. Lacan's influence extends well beyond clinical psychoanalysis into film theory, feminist theory, political philosophy, and cultural studies, particularly through readers such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler. Current debates concern the status of his late teaching on the real, jouissance, and the sinthome; the relation between Lacanian practice and regulatory frameworks for psychotherapy in Europe; and the global expansion of Lacanian schools in Latin America and beyond.

Key players

Language and the Structure of the Unconscious

The question of language has been central to psychoanalysis since Freud's earliest case studies, where slips of the tongue, jokes, and symptoms were read as forms of speech addressed to an other. Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) treated linguistic phenomena as privileged access to unconscious processes, and his clinical method, the talking cure, made speech the medium of treatment itself. This linguistic dimension was largely backgrounded by mid-century ego psychology, which emphasized adaptation and developmental schemas. The linguistic turn in psychoanalysis is most associated with Lacan, who from the 1950s drew on Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between signifier and signified and on Roman Jakobson's analysis of metaphor and metonymy to argue that the unconscious is structured like a language. In this framework, the subject is constituted in and by the symbolic order, desire is articulated through chains of signifiers, and the analytic act operates on speech rather than on behavior or affect alone. Related work in the same period, including Émile Benveniste on subjectivity in language and Julia Kristeva on the semiotic, extended these concerns. Contemporary debates concern the limits of the linguistic model, including critiques from affect theory, neuropsychoanalysis, and infant research that emphasize pre-verbal and bodily registers; the implications of multilingual clinical practice; and the status of writing, mathemes, and topology in late Lacanian theory. The politics of language, in postcolonial and diasporic settings, has also become a significant axis of discussion within the field.

Key players

Repression: From Freudian Foundations to Contemporary Critiques

Repression (Verdrängung) is one of the founding concepts of psychoanalysis. Freud first developed it in the 1890s in his work with Breuer on hysteria, arguing that symptoms arose when unbearable representations were excluded from consciousness but continued to exert force from the unconscious. He distinguished primal repression, which establishes the unconscious itself, from secondary repression operating on derivatives of repressed material, and he reworked the concept across his career, notably in the 1915 metapsychological paper Repression and in the 1926 revision Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, where anxiety becomes the signal that triggers defense rather than its product. Post-Freudian traditions have transformed the concept. Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) embedded repression within a broader taxonomy of defenses; Kleinian and object-relations theorists emphasized splitting and projective identification; Lacanian theory rereads repression as the operation of the signifier and links it to the bar between conscious discourse and unconscious chains. Trauma theory, attachment research, and neuroscience have proposed alternative or complementary accounts involving dissociation, memory consolidation, and inhibitory control. The concept has also been at the center of public controversy, including the recovered memory debates of the 1980s and 1990s, which raised acute questions about the reliability of memories of childhood abuse and the suggestive power of clinical settings. Current discussions concern how repression should be understood in relation to dissociation and trauma, its empirical status, its forensic implications, and its usefulness as a category for analyzing collective historical silencing.

Key players

Sexuality in Psychoanalytic Theory

Sexuality has been a defining and controversial concern of psychoanalysis since Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), which displaced the idea of a single mature heterosexual instinct in favor of a polymorphous infantile sexuality organized through component drives, erogenous zones, and developmental phases. Freud's claims about infantile sexuality, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, and the differential development of masculinity and femininity provoked immediate resistance and have remained contested within and outside the field, including in the 1920s and 1930s debates between Freud, Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, and others on female sexuality. Lacan reframed sexuality through his formulas of sexuation, arguing that there is no sexual relation and that masculine and feminine positions are structural rather than biological. Feminist theorists from Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray to Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler have engaged psychoanalysis both critically and productively, while queer theory has drawn on, revised, and rejected various psychoanalytic claims about identification, desire, and normativity. The pathologization of homosexuality, formally abandoned by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, remains a significant historical reckoning for the field. Contemporary debates concern psychoanalysis's engagement with trans and non-binary experience, with consent and power in clinical and pedagogical settings, with sex work and pornography, and with the cross-cultural and decolonial critique of universalist theories of sexual development. These debates unfold against very different national legal and political contexts.

Key players

The Self: Psychoanalytic and Cross-Theoretical Conceptions

The category of the self has a complex and contested status in psychoanalysis. Freud's structural model of id, ego, and superego, elaborated in The Ego and the Id (1923), did not deploy a unified concept of self, and his German terms Ich and Selbst were translated and interpreted in divergent ways. Mid-century ego psychology, associated with Heinz Hartmann and others in the United States, made the ego and adaptive functioning central, while Donald Winnicott in Britain developed the influential distinction between true and false self in the context of object-relations theory. Self psychology emerged as a distinct school through the work of Heinz Kohut in Chicago from the 1970s, particularly in The Analysis of the Self (1971) and The Restoration of the Self (1977). Kohut emphasized empathy, selfobject experiences, and disorders of the self, especially narcissistic pathology, and his framework became the basis of an international relational and intersubjective movement. Lacan, by contrast, was sharply critical of any psychology of the self, treating the ego as a site of imaginary misrecognition formed through the mirror stage and resisting the therapeutic ideals of self-integration prevalent in Anglophone analysis. Contemporary discussions concern the relation between psychoanalytic notions of self, subjectivity, and identity; the dialogue with attachment research, mentalization-based treatment, and developmental neuroscience; and cross-cultural critiques of the bounded, individual self assumed by much Western theory. The category remains a key site where psychoanalysis meets philosophy of mind, social theory, and clinical practice.

Key players

The Oedipus Complex: Formulation, Revision, and Critique

The Oedipus complex is one of Freud's most distinctive and contested contributions. He introduced the idea in correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess in 1897 and developed it publicly from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) onward, treating the child's libidinal attachment to one parent and rivalry with the other as a structuring moment of psychic life and the matrix of neurosis. In later texts, including Totem and Taboo (1913) and The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud generalized the complex to cultural and anthropological terrain and linked its resolution to the formation of the superego. The concept was contested almost immediately. Bronisław Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork challenged its universality; Melanie Klein relocated Oedipal dynamics to a much earlier developmental stage; Karen Horney and others questioned its account of female development; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus (1972), mounted a sweeping political critique of its familialism. Lacan reformulated the complex in terms of the paternal function and the Name-of-the-Father, treating it as a structural operation in the symbolic order rather than a literal family drama, and his late work increasingly relativized its centrality. Contemporary debates concern the relevance of the Oedipus complex in the context of diverse family structures, including single-parent, same-sex, and reconstituted families; cross-cultural and decolonial critiques of its Eurocentric assumptions; and its standing in light of developmental research. It remains a key reference point even where it is rejected, and its history illustrates broader tensions between clinical theory, anthropology, and social change.

Key players

Dream Interpretation in Psychoanalysis

Dream interpretation has occupied a central place in psychoanalysis since Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which he later described as containing the most valuable of all the discoveries he had been fortunate enough to make. Freud distinguished manifest from latent content, identified condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision as the work of the dream, and treated dreams as disguised fulfillments of unconscious wishes. The royal road to the unconscious metaphor came to define a method in which free association on dream elements opened access to repressed material. Post-Freudian traditions revised this framework in significant ways. Carl Jung emphasized archetypal and compensatory dimensions of dreams within his analytical psychology; Kleinian and object-relations analysts attended to early object configurations and primitive anxieties; and Lacan reread the dream-work as a rhetorical operation, aligning condensation with metaphor and displacement with metonymy. From the 1950s onward, sleep and dream research, including REM studies by Aserinsky, Kleitman, and Dement, and later neurobiological models such as Hobson and McCarley's activation-synthesis hypothesis, raised sharp challenges to Freudian dream theory. Contemporary work attempts to integrate or contest these strands. Neuropsychoanalysis, associated with Mark Solms and others, has revived interest in the neural bases of dreaming and their compatibility with motivational accounts. Clinically, the use of dreams varies widely across schools and cultures, and debates continue over their epistemic status, their role in trauma treatment, and the relation between dreaming and waking subjectivity.

Key players