Call for Papers and Panel Proposals is now closed

The 2027 IARPP Conference invites us to step through the looking glass and enter a new landscape of human experience – one where the familiar coordinates of presence, embodiment, and relationality have undergone profound transformations, driven by interactive devices, artificial intelligence, and digital environments.

In contemporary clinical thought, the body is no longer viewed merely as a container for experience but is widely recognized as a fundamental participant in the co-construction of meaning. Research into implicit relational knowing, embodied cognition, affect regulation, and trauma invites us to continually re-examine how the body communicates, remembers, is inhabited, and inhabits experience.

We are ceaselessly immersed in worlds where technology increasingly permeates our relationship with otherness – with the human and the non-human, with challenge and surrender, with life and death – and where the body is traversed, extended, manipulated, and reshaped by interfaces, images, and information flows. Furthermore, the digital transformation of human experience is reshaping how communities are formed, how social bonds are maintained, and how collective identities are negotiated. These changes invite us to think not only about the shifting nature of individual subjectivity but also about the unconscious processes that organize our sense of belonging and interdependence.

The consulting room is no exception. The rapid spread of online psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, as well as of artificial intelligence platforms, alongside developments in neuroscience, challenges us to rethink what it means to encounter the other in analytic work. How do we understand presence when bodies are physically absent yet visible and audible – affectively alive – within the therapeutic space? What is created, what is transformed, and what is lost or gained when analyst and patient meet across a screen? How does the digital medium shape experience, relationship, and narrative within the analytic field? What kind of nostalgia might arise at the end of analysis, when shared spaces had only been virtual? What happens when a person relies on dialogue with a chatbot to share their lived experiences, analyze dreams, or entrust parts of their therapeutic journey to AI platforms? And what if the therapist does so? What are the implications – not only for space and bodies, but also for time, the therapeutic setting, creativity, responsibility, and ethics? Should we not, then, speak of a new form of complexity?

This conference aims to explore the possibilities and tensions, the fears and enthusiasms, inherent in the dilemmas of the multiple embodied and disembodied forms of presence. We invite reflections on the role of the patient's and analyst's bodies in the therapeutic encounter; on the challenges and opportunities offered by online therapies; on the impact of digital technologies on subjectivity and intimacy; and on how contemporary relational psychoanalysis can continue to engage with embodied and experiential approaches, whether in shared or virtual spaces, without losing its commitment to complexity and mutuality in rewriting the forms of meaning that define our humanity.

The IARPP Conference – hosted for the third time in Rome, a city that has always been a crossroads of eras and cultures where layers of history and collective memory are constantly renegotiated – urges us to take further steps amidst continuity and change. Like Alice stepping through the looking-glass, crossing a threshold that allows her to enter a different space-time – inverted and devoid of logic – we are invited to enter territories that may initially seem unusual, disorienting, or paradoxical. Yet, it is often precisely in these liminal spaces – between presence and absence, virtual reality and physical reality – that the exploration of new forms of understanding, connection, and transformation becomes possible. After all, Rome reminds us that every transformation stems from an engagement with the past, offering a rich and complex backdrop for exploring how new digital forms of subjectivity and mutuality are transforming human relationality.

We invite contributions that explore these themes from clinical, theoretical, interdisciplinary, cultural, and social perspectives, with the aim of charting paths for psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic practice.

We welcome all IARPP members to submit proposals only for individual papers and/or panels pertaining broadly to the conference theme. We encourage those who would like to submit to join IARPP now for the member year 2027.*

*Please note: Member benefit of Psychoanalytic Dialogues begins in 2027.

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If you have any questions, please contact IARPP Conference Manager Nilou Mostofi at nilou@km-direct.com.