14th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference
Psychoanalysis between Catastrophe and Creation: Emerging Perspectives
May 29 – June 1, 2024
Hosted by the GBPSF in São Paulo, Brazil
Official languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish
Proposal Submission Deadline: October 15th 2023
Ours is a time of trauma. After centuries of destruction through slavery, war and genocide, there is rising nationalism, fear, and hatred, mixed with violence, all around the world. Existential threats—climate change, ecological disasters, and the pandemic—intensify inequality, racism, fanaticism, terrorism, and worse. Sándor Ferenczi’s contributions are exceptionally helpful in our understanding of current global challenges.
Throughout his working life, Ferenczi consistently showed deep understanding of the complex and traumatizing social, political dynamics of power and human vulnerability. His explorations of finding ways of connecting with others–the themes of disavowal, fragmentation, identification with the aggressor, confusion of languages, as well as his progressive clinical work in responding to traumatic experiences–reflect contemporary egalitarian ideals and may enhance our capacity to think and act with others.
The Four Themes of the Conference show the rich and fertile basis for a creative and critical understanding of the catastrophes in our time, using Ferenczi’s contributions and how those contributions enrich our psychoanalytic perspectives to respond to the destabilizing upheavals in our world.
- Emerging from Catastrophes. Social and Environmental Transformations.
- The Clinical and the Sociopolitical. Challenges for Psychoanalysis in Times of Trauma.
- Fragmentation and its Consequences on Psychic Life.
- Confusion of Languages. Tenderness, Trauma and Toxicity.
The 14th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, will be a forum for clinicians, scholars, researchers, students, and colleagues from other fields of knowledge for open, and collegial discussions about the disruptive personal, social, political, environmental, and clinical situations that we are facing today.
We invite proposals to be considered in the sessions of the São Paulo conference. Both clinical and theoretical papers are encouraged, and students, if they prefer, may also submit a poster presentation. Presenters, as all participants, have to register for the conference.
The Deadline for Proposal Submissions is Sunday, October 15th, 2023.
Please go to www.ferencziconference14.com for more detailed information and guidelines of proposal submissions.
FUNDRAISING ANNOUNCEMENT
After many months of careful work, the Board of the International Sándor Ferenczi Network approved the editorial project of a new English edition of the complete works of Ferenczi, The Network Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Writings of Sándor Ferenczi. This project is envisioned as an indispensable foundation for future research and scholarship regarding Ferenczi, and the culmination of the “Ferenczi renaissance” that began with the publication of the Clinical Diary in 1985.
Further support of this project was given by the ISFN General Assembly in November 2020, which approved its financing through fundraising.
Our International Sándor Ferenczi Network developed out of 25 years of meetings, exchanges and discussions among a group of people who found the works of Sándor Ferenczi a source of profound inspiration.
We are not a professional organization. Most of us are practicing clinicians from diverse backgrounds and traditions, but there also general practitioners, historians, sociologists, philosophers, and humanists among us. We are an inclusive organization, and welcome all who are interested in an open dialogue and are willing to explore or develop further any of the many areas of knowledge, which belongs to the legacy of Ferenczi. We welcome as well membership applications of general practitioners who work along the lines developed by Ferenczi and Michael Balint, psychotherapists who integrate the body into the therapeutic process and all of those who work with traumatized people in various therapeutic settings. At the same time our main focus remains psychoanalysis but accepting the challenge that psychoanalysis has to adapt to our ever-changing society, the deep continuity in changes, and that our forum is enriched by diversity. We believe that the teachings of Ferenczi have the potential to reunite the dissecta membra of psychoanalysis, thus transforming the “Ferenczi Renaissance” into a Renaissance of psychoanalysis.
Through our website we aim to provide information about conferences, seminars, and events, and access to documents. Included are: