Call for Papers

Disorientation, Displacement, Resilience:
Psychoanalysis in a Time of Polycrisis

with keynote presentation by Noëlle McAfee
“New Fascist Maladies of the Soul”

Hybrid Conference
October 15-18, 2026

Rutgers University Continuing Education Conference Center, New Brunswick, NJ

Journal Board Meeting, Sunday, October 19, 8:00-9:30am EST
Executive Board Meeting 9:45-12pm EST

Deadline for Submissions: May 15, 2026
Conftool portal now open
https://www.conftool.net/apcs2026/

Many commentators have described our historical moment as a “polycrisis”: a convergence of ecological disruption, geopolitical instability, technological transformation, and institutional fragmentation. These developments are not experienced only at the level of global systems. They also reshape the psychic conditions through which individuals and communities make sense of the world. From a psychoanalytic perspective, such conditions raise fundamental questions about authority, temporality, responsibility, and the place of the human subject. In some contexts, established institutions appear to be weakening, generating distrust, fragmentation, and disorientation. In others, perceived threats lead to renewed investments in authority and the search for stabilizing figures or systems capable of containing uncertainty.

At the same time, new technological infrastructures (particularly those associated with artificial intelligence and predictive systems) are increasingly positioned as tools for interpretation, decision-making, and even emotional mediation. These developments invite reflection on how technological systems may participate in the contemporary organization of desire, authority, and responsibility. This raises an additional question: whether the contemporary enthusiasm for automation and algorithmic delegation expresses is in part, a fantasy of relief from the burdens of judgment, responsibility, and subjectivity itself. Technologies may be mobilized in many different ways, but they may also serve as instruments through which the drives organize contemporary forms of retreat from uncertainty and conflict. In this sense, the increasing delegation of human capacities to automated systems invites reflection on whether elements of our technological culture may function in the service of the death drive -not as an inherent property of machines, but as a cultural formation through which subjects seek relief from the tensions of desire, responsibility, and encounter with the other.

The 2026 APCS Conference invites contributions that explore the psychic, cultural, and political dimensions of the contemporary polycrisis. We welcome theoretical, clinical, and interdisciplinary work that reflects on how psychoanalysis can illuminate the tensions between authority and freedom, technological mediation and human responsibility, disorientation and resilience. Rather than resolving these tensions, we are interested in work that explores their complexity and ambivalence, and that reflects on what it might mean today to act, think, and speak in the name of the human. We invite you to join us in exploring these critical issues. Topics/themes for panels, roundtables, conversation plenaries, and study hour discussions devoted to relevant concepts may include:


Polycrisis and the Collapse of Symbolic Authority

  • Authority and its discontents

  • Institutional distrust and the search for stabilizing figures

  • Authoritarian formations under conditions of uncertainty

Technology and the Contemporary Subject

  • Artificial intelligence and the mediation of knowledge

  • Automation, responsibility, and the delegation of judgment

  • Predictive systems and the transformation of attention

Time, Crisis, and Psychic Space

  • Crisis and the experience of time

  • Acceleration and the limits of reflection

  • Trauma, temporality, and deferred action

The Human Under Pressure

  • Mourning, ecological anxiety, and loss

  • The ethics of ordinary unhappiness

  • Resilience, sublimation, and survival

Politics, Responsibility, and the Encounter with the Other

  • Collective identification and disidentification

  • Recognition, decency, and political life

  • Psychoanalysis and the defense of the human


Details

Individual paper proposals may be submitted, as well as symposium, roundtable, conversation hours or working session proposals. Most sessions will be 90 minutes long. Individual papers will be grouped into themed panels.

Speaking time is limited to ensure time for all, and time for discussion

  • Panel and symposium formats presume no more than 15 minutes per speaker

  • Roundtables presume no more than 7 minutes per speaker

  • Conversation Hours should include a diversity of perspectives on a chosen topic.

  • All panels should reserve at least 30 minutes for audience participation

At APCS, we value conversation. Keeping your own remarks within the allotted time helps to ensure that all participants can engage in the dialogue. We hope that all presenters will offer their ideas in a conversational style (avoiding PowerPoint presentations where possible) and we also invite you to think of alternate formats that promote discussion.

APCS encourages all participants to reflect on the social importance of their contribution and to articulate that value in their presentation. It is our view that the psychoanalytic investigation of culture and society constitutes a unique and indispensable means of understanding AND intervening in our most serious social problems, and we encourage proposals that work to further this project.

We welcome submissions from a broad range of disciplines and psychoanalytic schools of thought. The conference will be of interest to psychoanalytically informed scholars in the social and political sciences, media, cultural and literary studies, and to clinicians and practitioners concerned to explore themes related to the psychic, the social and social justice.

Please check back at this website for updates or email Conference Co-Chairs (Marilyn Charles, Carol Owens, Erica Galioto, and Rubén Benavides Crespo)