In 2026, the Free offers an annual program on the theme Beyond War, Making Peace With Life:

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We might think of war not only as a geopolitical catastrophe of the external reality but also as a way the mind organises itself to survive trauma. When inner life feels unlivable, primitive defences are activated, and war offers a harsh sense of order. At these junctures,  the mind often seeks relief by splitting and by projecting unbearable feelings onto enemies, causes, or ideologies. Destructiveness becomes a way to regulate distress, and the shadow, or even the reality, of war falls on us.

 

We are in the warzone of the mind when the symbolic function is absent or weak. In these states, the soma, not the libidinal body, functions as the container of the powerful, unbound psychic forces. Links are absent or deteriorate; the transitional space collapses. The object becomes persecutory or empty. The negative controls—not simply absence, but active erosion of meaning.

 

By making peace with life, we don't mean pacification. What we mean is the recovery of livable psychic conditions: tolerating dependence without the sense of annihilation; accepting limitation without omnipotence; enduring separateness without turning it into persecution; mourning without creating enemies. Psychoanalytic peace is the restoration of mental life—the ability to construct meaning, to host conflict without erasing thought, to endure uncertainty, to hold ambivalence, and to let others remain other.

 

In 2026, the Free Association Lisbon approaches peace through symbolization, containment, and the possibilities of relating. We explore how analytic work transforms dread, rage, and blankness into experiences that can be dreamt, named, and thought. We consider the analyst’s mind and the analytic relationship as a living container for reverie, construction, and transformation. Beyond war, peace starts when psychic life returns: when we can think destructiveness, mourn loss, recover play, and reopen the future.