CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:
IFPE
International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education
35th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference
TRUTH
November 6 - 8, 2025
Yours Truly DC
IHG Vignette Collection Hotel
1143 New Hampshire Avenue NW
Washington D.C. 20037
Maira Kalman (Israeli, born 1949).
Sojourner Truth, Speak the Truth, 2018. Gouache on paper,
11 3/4 × 9 in. (29.8 × 22.9 cm).
Brooklyn Museum,
Gift of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York, 2018.58.
© Maira Kalman
(Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Awardees:
Dorothy E. Holmes, Ph.D.
Hans W. Loewald Memorial Award
Anne Adelman, Ph.D. & Kerry L. Malawista, Ph.D.
Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educators
Ana Lucia Araujo, Ph.D.
Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator
Daniel Gaztambide, Psy.D.
Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator
Call for Participation
We hope you will join us at IFPE’s 35th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference: TRUTH
As the saying goes, “the truth will set you free.” Yet, life teaches us that the truth is not always so easy to access. In fact, it can be said that the foundation of Psychoanalysis represented an effort to help individuals confront and reveal to themselves the truths that they have been too afraid to face. The harsh reality of some truths can be too difficult to swallow, so we often live in illusion. Indeed, clinicians sometimes support and even suggest illusion to help evade or tolerate a reality too horrific to face. Yet, we know that a life built on protracted illusion is a life built on a foundation of sand, fragile and unstable.
The challenge of truth presents itself in myriad domains. Couples often fight over truth, leaving clinicians hapless in the face of two witnesses to the same event offering completely different accounts. The social-cultural-political domain is often a fraught battle over competing narratives in a search for dominance, with truth sacrificed at the altar of hegemony. There is talk of fake news, alternative facts, silos of information impenetrable to contradictory facts. Where lies truth in this tangled web?
Our 2025 IFPE Conference in the Nation’s Capital was originally themed as “Repair.” Current events in our country raise the question of whether this moment offers opportunity for repair. In the UN’s description of the 5 ingredients of reparation, the very first is a comprehensive truth telling. Without at least a loose consensus on truth, there can be no repair, be that of the individual, the couple, the small group, or the large collective. And thus, we backtrack in an effort to shore up the foundation, determine if we can find our way back to truth, whatever that may be. Our 2024 Loewald Award recipient, Lynne Layton, tells us that hegemony requires illusion built on the disavowal of truth, and that the search for truth requires “dis-illusionment,” painful though it may be.
What say us, this body of dedicated clinicians, researchers, professors, thinkers, about this struggle? Let us convene in DC and bring our best to meet the challenges of discovering elusive TRUTH.
Our conference will be held November 6 – 8th, 2025, in Washington D.C. at the Yours Truly DC, an IHG Vignette Collection Hotel.
Proposals are due by May 1st. Please click on the links at the bottom of this page to submit your proposal online, or to download the proposal form.
Bryan K. Nichols and Douglas F. Maxwell
Conference Co-chairs
Ideas to stimulate your thinking:
● Authenticity in treatment
● The nature of illusion
● Handling of views, including political, abhorrent to the therapist
● Owning bias and prejudice
● The search for the truth in the face of conflicting narratives
● How do we learn to trust our own mind?
● Differentiating between truth and opinion
● Cultivating psychoanalytic classrooms where students are encouraged to question canonical truths
● Is someone who has a different opinion a liar?
● How do we learn to question our own truths?
● Whose Truth?
● Dealing with Liars
● Emotional Truth
● When your client lies
Yours Truly DC Hotel room block conference rate is $229 (+taxes) per night.
About the hotel: https://www.ihg.com/vignettecollection/hotels/us/en/washington/wasvc/hoteldetail
Please click here to access the online Individual Proposal Form.
Please click here to access the online Panel/Other Proposal Form.
Please click here to download the Individual Proposal Form - Word document.
Please click here to download the Panel/Other Proposal Form - Word document.