SAPI/SAPA 2026 Conference

SAPI/SAPA 2026 Conference
Confirmed

KNOWING WHAT WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW: the ego is not master in its own house


The SAPI/SAPA 2026 Conference, titled Knowing What We Don’t Want to Know: the ego is not master in its own house, takes place at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg. We start at 12:30 on Thursday 28th May and conclude with a closing dinner on Saturday 30th May. The Conference programme features a series of creatively curated plenary and parallel sessions, fostering conversations between psychoanalysis and a range of other disciplines, including anthracology, literature, mathematics, physics, grassroots activism, neuroscience and philosophy.

This year's theme invites a psychoanalytic inquiry into the known, the hidden, the disavowed and the unknowable — not only in the individual psyche but also within social, historical, and political life. Psychoanalytic thought, from Freud to the present, has persistently returned to the question of what is defended against, what cannot be symbolised and what the self (or society) resists and refuses to know. Whether through repression, denial, disavowal, or foreclosure, the human psyche is structured around gaps and absences — things not only forgotten but actively unthought.

Echoing the currents of erasure, distortion, and wilful blindness that flowed through our 2025 conference, we aim to explore how unknowing (and knowing) operates — not just as lack, but as force: political, psychic, affective. What do we not want to know about trauma, sexuality, gender, race, privilege, history, the body, the self? What truths are scotomised, warped, rendered abject? What kinds of knowing are forbidden, punished, or declared unspeakable? How do we survive the dread and angst that reside in both uncertainty and conviction?

Download the programme here
More information and registration here
When
28/05/2026 - 30/05/2026
Where
Johannesburg SOUTH AFRICA