Events and Announcements_2025-26

Politics has long been a contested domain in psychoanalysis. Where Freud turned his gaze to the political in his writings about mass psychology and the mythical origins of humanity, most psychoanalytic traditions that have followed treat the political as something “external” to the person who comes in for analysis, “outside” of the consulting room, “foreign” to intrapsychic process. This roundtable will reflect on how the political has always punctured the analytic situation, whether it has been acknowledged or not. It will also explore the ways this puncturing materializes today, in the consulting room, in and through psychoanalytic institutes, and beyond our field in the public realm where interest in psychoanalytic thought seems to grow.

Far from casting psychical dynamics as simply mimetic of the political realm, we consider instead how the political is libidinally embedded in the psyche and how psychic work might impact political desire. Beyond a (neo) liberal frame of representational politics (e.g., the who of the psychoanalytic dyad), we wish to examine how politics structure analytic encounters and arise in embodied, often unspoken ways. Three interwoven questions guide this gathering: How can we work across varied registers of meaning as they emerge in the consulting room and at our institutes? What has already changed about the ways in which we apprehend politics psychoanalytically? And what must be done—in terms of talk and action—to restructure the field around those whom psychoanalysis has injured and excluded? Speakers will respond to these questions and to each other rather than read prepared remarks. We will then open the floor for discussion and questions.