Engaging Difference and Sameness:
Pathways to Empathic Dialogue

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2019

JW Marriott Parq Vancouver
Vancouver, CANADA

We look forward to welcoming you to beautiful Vancouver for this year’s conference. This city is a dynamic, multi-cultural part of Canada’s Pacific Rim, founded on the unceded, territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations whose peoples have inhabited, honoured, and cared for this land since time immemorial. Within this context we will continue our search for a Psychoanalytic Self Psychology that can provide a meaningful and relevant response to our increasingly troubled, traumatized and traumatizing world.

Our Conference’s contribution to this search entails a rigorous inquiry into our constitutive multi-dimensional contextuality including contexts of politics, culture, history, race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. We therefore hope that the conference will open pathways to empathic dialogue and transformation not only for the therapeutic dyad, but also potentially in the surrounding political/cultural environment. Furthermore, by attending to the multiple dimensions of difference and sameness, as they emerge in the therapeutic process, we hope to put a definitive end to the comforting illusion that our consulting rooms can be kept separate from our troubled world.

The conference will begin with a keynote address by Philip Cushman, noted author of Travels with the Self: Interpreting Psychology as Cultural History, who will provide a challenging hermeneutic perspective whereby even our most treasured psychological theories and practices are disclosed to be historical artefacts reflecting the larger moral understandings and political arrangements of our time, arrangements that could preserve the very inequalities of power and privilege our community purports to deplore. An exciting and diverse array of plenaries will continue the dialogue: A quartet of respondents to Cushman’s Keynote address; Complementing Cushman’s hermeneutic analysis with a compelling dynamic systems understanding of the political; The historical trauma of Indigenous residential schools conveyed through a First Nation son of a survivor and an archivist’s heart-wrenching research; The challenge of working with culturally based assumptions embedded within our theories; A moving clinical case where mutual empathic connection is negotiated amidst a complex background of power, gender, cultural, and political differences.

We invite you to join us for what promises to be a clinically relevant, enriching educational experience and to feel at home in our vibrant, supportive international community. Small discussion groups led by seasoned clinicians follow each plenary, offering the opportunity to discuss thoughts, ideas and questions in an intimate and supportive setting. There will also be Workshops and Original Paper Presentations.