The annual conference and PhD Course will take place at the Inter University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 27–31 May 2024.

Theme: Translating the Social

Psychosocial Studies “seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process”, writes Stephen Frosh (2014) in “The Nature of the Psychosocial.” We do well to read these lines carefully. The specific relational forms they invoke point toward the central challenge in our field. No matter in what way we may capture the relationship between the psychic and the social, a task of translation is inevitable and inherent to it. Indeed, even if we have settled for the – perhaps still least intuitive – resolution of the psychic and the social being parts of, or moments in, the same process, we as scholars are still faced with the question of how to translate this process into a form in which it can be understood, reflected upon and integrated into our being (as) part of this process.

Our subjectivity might by no means end at the borders of our bodies, membraned and demarcated by our skin, but extend into our living and work spaces, our families and circle of friends, our neighbourhoods, communities and ‘networks,’ even into the ways in which industries are structured (‘When it comes to cars, I’m totally German!’ exclaimed a fellow traveller to Steffen on a recent trip…). Yet, in order to appreciate and act upon such an expanded sense of subjecthood, we still need to rely on our bodies, our skin and senses for our thinking to become informed by what lies outside ourselves but belongs to it all the same.

While the SQUID symposium can look back on a long tradition of creating such translations with the help of psychoanalytic theory, this theory’s small-scale relational focus has tended to give preference to the ‘in-here’ of individual practice rather than to this practice’s institutional-societal complementaries and correspondents. Furthermore, and due to its rootedness in in-depth hermeneutics and “scenic understanding” (Lorenzer), the symposium might have given preference in recent years to the technicalities of translation, rather than focusing on the various forms this process can take.

Additionally, conceptions of reality, social and other, have gone through substantial changes during the past decades, with the Anthropocene and the Climate Crisis, digitisation and rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence, as well as significant developments in bioengineering posing new questions about what it means to be human as part of the natural world. Theories of posthumanism and a keen interest in the non-human, in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, as well as the conception of the social in terms of assemblages and rhizomes not only pose new questions to psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies but are frequently formulated in direct opposition to them.

Departing from an inquiry into the nature of translation itself, the 2024 SQUID symposium will home in on current theoretical paradigms in the translation of the social in an effort to negotiate their bearing on psychoanalytic/psychosocial thought.

For more information about the 204 conference, please contact Head of the Executive Committee, Steffen Krüger (steff.krueger@gmail.com)