FREE ASSOCIATION LISBON

Is it appropriate to hold an international conference when war is waging so close to Budapest? Sándor Ferenczi would certainly have answered this question in the affirmative. After all, he organized the 5th International Psychoanalytic Congress in September 1918 at the end of World War I.

​

In 2023, we will be paying tribute to the 150th anniversary of Ferenczi’s birth and of the founding of Budapest. Ferenczi’s clinical and theoretical work and his influence in integrating the ideas of psychoanalysis into culture, the arts and social scientific thought have created potential for development like the integration of the former towns of Pest, Buda and Óbuda to form a world city. The theme of the conference, as we intend it, offers an opportunity to approach the current phenomena and challenges of the 21st century in the spirit of Ferenczi.

​

THE CONFERENCE FOCUSES ON THEORETICAL, CLINICAL, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

   THE MAIN THEMES ARE:

• Ferenczi legacy in contemporary psychoanalysis: clinical and theoretical innovations

• The unwelcome child phenomena in our time

• Trauma (at individual / family / group / societal level) and resilience

• Fragmentation and integration in the development of personality

• Ferenczi and the Budapest School of psychoanalysis

• Psychoanalysis and its interdisciplinary links: literature, art, film

​

   WIDENING THE SCOPE:

• Fragmentation and primitive mental states

• Lines of convergence: Ferenczi, Winnicott, Bion, and others

• Maintaining a psychoanalytic mind under overwhelming external threats: war, forced migration, epidemic

• The bilingualism/multilingualism in psychoanalysis: individual and professional perspectives

• Contributions of experimental approaches to psychoanalysis