Past Annual Conferences < European Psychoanalytical Federation

24-26/3/2023: Illusions - Illusionen - Illusions. Annual Conference 2023 in Cannes

36^th EPF ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2023

March 24th, 25th, 26th 2023

Illusions Illusionen Illusions

Venue:

Palais des Festivals et des Congrès de Cannes

For more information click here

The full programme - click here

Online-registration --- Click here!

************ Early bird deadline is extended to 1st March. ***********

ARGUMENT OF THE EPF ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2023 IN CANNES

As we prepare for the 36^th EPF conference in 2023 we are full of hope that the terrible Russian invasion of Ukraine will have been concluded along with an end to the pandemic and lessening of climate change. These world events have had a huge impact on psychoanalytic practice at a global level. We look forward to an atmosphere of reflection in order to facilitate analytic thinking on global trauma and crisis associated with the theme of illusions.

The etymology of the word ‘illusion’ across the three official EPF languages references perception and a subjective distortion of the perceived object. The Latin term ‘ludere’ means ‘to play’ and also to deceive. Illusion is associated with art, for example in Gombrich’s study of the pictorial representations of illusionist art (Gombrich 1959). Psychology, in a general way, explains that certain illusions are not simply a psychological process but involves specific brain processes that sometimes make sense or nonsense of the impulses arriving via the optic nerves. In philosophy perhaps it is mostly Kant who defines illusions as transcendental and in his view, in accordance with Freud, suggests illusions are natural, like certain optical illusions (Kant 1781). They do not disappear, but we can come to realise that certain illusions are misleading.

In psychoanalysis, it is Freud’s paper ‘The Future of an Illusion’ (1927), in which the term ‘illusion’ first became prominent in the psychoanalytic literature, during the phase of his late work (1920 – 1939). According to James Strachey in his ‘Editorial Notes’ Freud wrote in his Postscript to his Autobiographical Study, that ‘…a significant change’ had emerged in his writings between 1925 and 1935.

My interest, after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking’ (S.E. 20: 72).

Strachey points out that Freud had previously touched on these topics, for example in ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1912 – 13), but it was in the writing of ‘The Future of an Illusion’ that Freud ‘…entered on the series of studies which were to be his major concern for the remainder of his life’. Of these the most important were ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ (1930), which is the direct successor to ‘The Future of an Illusion’.

Both papers, significantly, led up to the 1933 paper ‘Why War?’ during a period in European history when the rise of Hitler in Germany was threatening world peace.

Stemming from Freud’s critiques on religion and culture arose the Frankfurter school, with its classical study of the authoritarian personality. On February 24^th 2022, Freud’s paper on war became once more pertinent to Europe when the world seemed to stand by helplessly as the violent and murderous invasion took place by the Russian army on the people of Ukraine. This unprovoked invasion threw the world into the horrors of war, causing thousands of people to flee their homeland.

This was no illusion but a terrible and agonising reality that at the same time felt unbelievable to so many of us. The traumatic effects of both the pandemic since 2020 and the Russian invasion of 2022 have affected and continue to affect all of us. Meanwhile, for several decades now, the whole world edges to the brink of devastating climate change on a scale that has never happened before.

The ethical position of psychoanalysis, while ever present, has once again, as in WW2, come to the fore. How can psychoanalysis be practiced in a totalitarian regime in which there is no freedom of thought and no space to think and reflect from a position of safety and freedom?

When Marion Milner started her analysis with Sylvia Payne (who was the first female President of the British Psychoanalytical Society), it coincided with the start of WW2. At the same time Milner also started writing her book, ‘On Not Being Able to Paint’. Her use of the term illusion was inspired by the American Spanish philosopher George Santayana who wrote that symbolism cannot be understood unless we regard it as a form of imagination ‘happily grown significant…in imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience…’ Milner concludes that ‘the substance of experience is what we bring to what we see, without our own contribution we see nothing’ (1950 p. 27). This profoundly enlarges the concept of the transference- countertransference matrix and reaches forward to the realm of symbolic thinking and its acquisition. At around the same time Winnicott was developing his ideas of the transitional object and transitional phenomena that strongly resonate with Milner's formulation of ‘illusion’ (Winnicott 1953 p. 90). He referred to the ‘substance of illusion’ which emerges out of the early mother-infant merger. While Milner saw that there was no meaning in life without the self's inner contribution to perception, Winnicott focused on the necessity of the experience of the ‘illusion of omnipotence’ - a mother who adapts to the infant's needs so that the infant feels like God. For Winnicott, this was the fundamental experience for a nascent self to begin to become a Self as long as the process of disillusionment was also facilitated by the mother. ‘The subject of illusion […] will be found to provide the clue to a child’s interest in bubbles and clouds and rainbows and all mysterious phenomena, and also to his interest in fluff’ (Winnicott, 1968).

Both overlapping and complementary theoretical contributions offer fruitful formulations for psychoanalysis although some post Kleinians see transitional phenomena as a sign of a psychic retreat and therefore psychopathological (Steiner 1992). This difference of view could be a stimulating point of dialogue between analysts from different theoretical orientations. For example, how does unconscious phantasy link with illusions? How does the theme of illusions feature in Bion’s work?

If we examine the use of illusion across the psychoanalytic literature it becomes clear that the term is used in widely variable ways starting from Freud. The majority of meanings suggest that while illusions are ‘natural’ in development they are something to develop away from or grow out of. Post Freudian and Kleinian contemporary literature imply this meaning and there are fine lines between hallucination, delusion, disillusion and illusion. How does each analyst, depending on their clinical paradigm, refer to illusion in psychoanalysis? Is it at the very heart of the transference-countertransference matrix? How does the topic of illusions relate to crisis and the fraught conflicts concerning online analysis and psychoanalytic practice in the context of war? How do these questions challenge our beliefs? How do we retain a sense of hope in the midst of violent and unmitigating disaster?

We look forward to finding ways of exploring some of these questions and welcoming you in 2023 for the EPF’s 36^th Annual Conference.

References supplied at request

Heribert Blass, President

Jan Abram, Vice President, Annual Conferences

Ewa Glod, General Secretary

15-17/7/2022: IDEALS. 35th Annual Conference in Vienna

FULL PROGRAM AND TIME TABLE

Argument

Dear colleagues,

we have chosen the theme of Ideals for the EPF 35th annual conference to be held in Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis. As many of you will remember, EPF was due to hold the 33rd annual conference in Vienna in 2020 but due to the pandemic we were obliged to cancel the event at very short notice. However, we did not cancel the programme on the theme of Realities and were obliged to arrange an online conference in 2021. Now we are going to Vienna with this new theme.

Let us first of all take a brief look at the etymology of the term ‘ideal’. Jorge Canestri, in the EPF Bulletin 55, 2001, observed that the term ‘ideal’ had a common root with ‘idol’ from the Greek word ‘idéa’ meaning to ‘see’. The literal meaning of the Greek idéa is “…aspect,shape, appearance…and even though this term was already used in philosophy byDemocritus with the meaning of ‘shape or visible schema’ the word is a direct consequenceof Plato’s philosophy, when it took on the meaning of abstract model and ideal that we lookupon as a measure of comparison”. Canestri’s reflection posited an emphasis on ‘theinevitable oscillation between seeing and thinking, form and representation, image andabstraction…’ and turning to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism he cited Freud’s well-known proposal concerning the human discovery of the mind related to the infant turning from one parent to the other:

…this turning from mother to father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality oversensuality…an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senseswhile paternity is a hypothesis…in this way a thought-process in preference to a senseperception has proved to be a momentous step. (Freud 1939 p. 114)

Freud first conceptualized the term ‘Idealich’ in 1914 in his paper On Narcissism: An Introduction and later in 1923 in The Ego and The Id, but he did not differentiate between ‘Idealich’ (ideal ego) and ‘Ichideal’ (ego-ideal). Followers of Freud began to propose certain distinctions. For example, Lacan (1966) differentiated the Ego (Moi) from the Ideal Ego (Moi idéal) and Ego Ideal (Idéal du Moi). The Ego as bodily ego is mediated by the infant’s mirror stage, while the Ideal Ego is a bodily model of idealized others which causes a tension with the Ego. The subject measures his ideal not against himself, but against the image which in his mind is desirable for Another. This image is his Ideal Ego. A third party thus mediates recognition or denial of recognition (“the Other with big A”). When the subject identifies with this Other and his judgement regarding the Ideal Ego, The Ego-Ideal emerges.

The Ego-Ideal provides for the regulation of the relationship between the Ego and the Ideal Ego. And through the Ego-Ideal originating from the Other, symbolization arises. Thus, the Ideal Ego as an image belongs to the imaginary register, while the Ego-Ideal as the result of an also linguistically mediated identification with a significant Other belongs to the symbolic register (we will refrain here from discussing the relationship between Moi and Je). These differentiations relate to the question of how ideals can serve the formation and maintenance of libidinal and object-related goals or how they can be used for goals on the level of defending primary narcissism in both individuals and groups which are potentially destructive. Following the evolution of psychoanalytic theories on ideals since Freud we can ascertain that for everybody ideals help to structure psychic life, but they can also become tyrannical and tormenting, while on the other hand a lack of ideals can lead to feelings of disorientation, emotional emptiness and despair.

For the psychoanalyst there is an optimal way to practice psychoanalysis that came about from Sigmund Freud’s consulting room in Vienna. He devised the most favourable way to treat the hysteric. While his setting evolved in an almost accidental way it soon became the standard way to practice psychoanalysis. The structure of analytic sessions and the mode of being with a patient became the methodology: because it functioned well. Could we concur that this established way of practising clinical psychoanalytic work has become the ideal of psychoanalytic practice?

The pandemic of 2020 changed the way analysts customarily treat patients in a radical way and in a way that Freud, and the majority of us, would never have imagined remotely possible. Analysts who had long maintained a serious criticism of so-called ‘remote analysis’ and who dismissed it as a distortion of psychoanalysis were obliged for the first time to ‘see’ their patients ‘remotely’. Many were resistant but the majority of analysts all over the world had to face a grim reality when their governments instructed us all to lockdown and to stay at home. Each analyst made the difficult decision to either work online or on the phone or to continue to see patients while taking all the necessary safety measures like wearing a mask and ensuring distance and open windows.

Rather quickly analysts started writing about the new situation and the pressures it was putting on their practice. Some analysts had already worked with patients who were living abroad and so it was not such a strain for them as it was for those who had never considered it possible to work analytically online without the patient in the room. During that time each analyst would have to rely on the patient to be responsible for the control of the setting and each analyst was exploring the issues concerning psychic work in the treatment of a patient who is not in the room with them. Are these changes calling into question an ideal of psychoanalytic work?

Turning to the outside world how do we apply our psychoanalytic theories, arising from clinical practice, to understand the other kinds of pandemics such as, for example, the rise of populism on an international level? Already, before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world was witnessing the horrors of climate change alongside a U.K. Brexit plan that was based on an ideology of ‘taking back control’. And this ‘idealization’ of human values reminds of us German history and its dark chapter of the prevailing Nazi-ideology that showed the danger in which idealization is used as a defence against the unavoidable disappointments in human experience. Over-idealization can so easily become a perverted form of creating so called ideals which lead to destructive processes and outcomes. The ideology at the root of Brexit threatens to divide a united Europe that had emanated from the ashes of two terrible world wars that had taken place on Europe soil.

A look at our contemporary world, especially adolescents and young people, shows a tension and gap between a search for ideals, a lack of ideals and a fundamental dependency on ideals that amount to ideologies. Does an ideology arise due to a lack of resources and opportunities? Perhaps the alarming rise of populism in the West indicates the human tendency to deny feelings of insecurity by enlisting simplistic ideologies that constitute a sham security. But psychoanalysis is not free from creating its own ideologies stemming from historical conflicts about what constitutes the ideal theory and practice of psychoanalysis. What is the optimal way to train psychoanalysts? How do we ideally assess the analyst-to-be and continue to monitor the analyst-who-is-becoming? In examining our own divisions within our psychoanalytic organisations is it possible to address the issues of prejudice that threatens to destroy the heart of psychoanalysis? Might that be a solution to understanding the rise of populism? How can psychoanalysis cure the ills of our contemporary world?

We are looking forward to inviting you to Vienna to discuss these questions and themes in person we sincerely hope for the EPF’s 35th Annual Conference.

Heribert Blass President

Jan Abram Vice President and Chair of the Scientific Committee

Ewa Glód General Secretary

All references available from [email protected]

Individual papers

Click here to open the list of confirmed individual papers

26-28/3/2021: REALITIES -- EPF Online Conference

EPF ONLINE CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

PROGRAM for the Online Conference "Realities" - Click here to download the program leaflet

The online conference will take place on Friday 26^th, Saturday 27^th, Sunday 28^th March 2021. There will be 3 main plenaries as usual for each day. On Friday and Saturday there will be 5 parallel panels mid-morning and afternoon. The programme is based on the programme of the cancelled 2020 conference. Some panels will take place as part of an EPF online seminar or the EPF conference in 2022

Plenary Speakers: Werner Bohleber, Judy Gammelgaard, Mary Hepworth, Stephan Doering, Andrea Marzi, Giuseppina Antinucci and Sylvain Missonnier.

The Conference Program at a glance - click here

Click here to see the ABSTRACTS of the EPF Online Conference 2021

Each participant will receive the abstract's leaflet of the panels..

A week prior to the conference each participant will receive an attachment with the links for plenaries and panels – this attachment will be issued only once – so it is important.

NB The online conference is limited to 1000 places so registration is recommended soon.

"Certification points“

Every participant who wants these certification points please contact [email protected] . After this contact participants will receive a page of the attendants list by conventional post. This list needs to be signed and send back to Brigitte Reusch. After Brigitte Reusch has received this page, she will send the signed confirmation with the points and the evaluation questionnaire by post again."