The Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Society  (IPA Study Group)
Invites you to participate in its annual online conference on November 14 – 15, 2026

Conference Theme:
"Building Bridges: Creating Space for Dialogue"

Format:
A two-day Zoom conference (9:00 – 16:00 CET), including plenary lectures, discussions, workshops and a round table.

Today it is remarkably easy to believe that the world is simple to understand. We arrive in an unfamiliar city and no longer feel the need to look for someone who might know it — a friend, perhaps, or a local historian who carries its stories. We do not even need a map. The whole world, it seems, now lives quietly inside our smartphones.

But does this mean that we understand the city itself? Its atmosphere, its particular spirit? Do we recognise how many different faces a city has — and how different it may appear to the person who actually lives there?

Something similar might be asked about the human being.

Have we really come to understand human nature simply because we have become knowledgeable about the psyche? Is familiarity with theories and typologies enough to tell us who a person is? When we look through the lens of our theories, what do we actually see — a configuration of psychic structures and processes, or a living person?

And even if it is true that every human life inevitably encounters the same fundamental experiences — birth, growing up, loss, and ultimately death — do theories help us grasp the complexity of a particular life as it is actually lived? How many different paths may unfold within what appears, from a distance, to be a predictable human journey?

These questions arise not only in our encounters with patients, but also between ourselves.

Do we — psychoanalysts — truly understand one another when we belong to different analytic traditions? What happens when we see different therapeutic aims in the very same clinical situation, and hold different convictions about what might help our patients: the experience of something lived through together, or the development of a capacity for a more separate and individuated way of being?

And how does a certain atmosphere come into being — one that allows analysts of different traditions to think together, and to observe the psychoanalytic process side by side?

Our conference is an invitation to explore these questions together. Not in the expectation that final answers will be found — for perhaps such answers do not exist — but in the hope that the search itself may become meaningful.

For it is precisely the process of thinking together — attentive, shared, and sometimes even contradictory — that creates a space in which understanding may begin to emerge. A space that helps to sustain the human world, and perhaps makes human life, at least subjectively, a little lighter.

The registration link is here

Contacts: Viktoriia Sliusarenko │ verkholazv@gmail.com