23-24 August 2027 – Warsaw, Poland
2nd IAAP Analytical European Children Conference
23-24 August 2027 - Warsaw, Poland
Who am I? Identities, Relationships, and Mirrors in Times of Transformation.
Jungian Perspectives on Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults Today
The conference Who am I? Identities, Relationships, and Mirrors in Times of Transformation constitutes an integral part of the VII European Analytical Congress, which will take place in Warsaw in August 2027. It is devoted to contemporary processes of identity formation as they emerge in the experience of children, adolescents, and young adults under conditions of profound social, cultural, and technological transformations.
Both in clinical practice and in the broader field of cultural observation, questions of identity increasingly rarely assume the form of developmental stages leading toward a stable resolution, and ever more frequently reveal themselves as enduring psychic tensions. In contemporary contexts, adolescents are confronted above all with the problematics of gender identity. At the same time, frequent doubts arise concerning cultural, national, and linguistic belonging, particularly in the context of economic migration, war‑related and political refuge, and global mobility. Increasingly prominent are also questions referring to the very status of human identity itself. These are not limited to issues of social recognition or cultural identification, but touch upon fundamental problems of the boundaries and forms of human subjectivity.
The second half of the twentieth century brought a fundamental shift in the way issues of gender, sexuality, and identity were problematized. The central field of reflection at that time became the problematics of gender, understood as the cultural construction of sex, closely linked with the First, Second, and Third Waves of feminism. This debate concerned social roles, representation, access to rights, and the position of women in the public sphere. In parallel, the issue of sexual orientation — homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual — was articulated with increasing clarity, gradually being conceived as a continuum of human sexuality rather than as a set of rigid normative categories. During the same period, forms of expression also emerged that exceeded the binary order of biological sex, such as transvestitism, which concerned modes of self‑presentation and self‑experience while not, however, calling into question sexual belonging itself.
In contemporary times, the center of gravity has undergone a decisive shift: the problematics of trans‑sexuality, understood as the questioning of one’s own biological sex, has become increasingly pronounced. Gender identity more and more often concerns an actual, bodily change of sex, encompassing hormonal and surgical interventions as well as formal, administrative correction of legal sex. This process is not limited to the administrative or medical dimension, but constitutes an event of profound psychic significance, engaging the relationship between body, symbolization, and social recognition.
From a clinical perspective, particularly significant is the marked lowering of the age of individuals who present questions and doubts concerning sexual orientation and gender identity, understood both in cultural and biological terms. At the beginning of the 1990s, these issues appeared in clinical practice primarily among adults, young adults, and older adolescents. At present, we observe a substantial shift of this boundary: questions concerning sexual orientation and one’s own biological sex are increasingly articulated by younger adolescents aged twelve, thirteen, or fourteen. In clinical practice, children of early school age also appear, and sporadically even children of preschool age, who begin to verbalize anxiety, uncertainty, or disorientation with regard to these domains. This change does not amount merely to an earlier expression of themes known from adolescence, but points to a profound transformation of developmental conditions, in which questions of identity — sexual and gender‑related — enter the structure of psychic experience significantly earlier than was the case in previous clinical observations.
Another significant area of contemporary identity tensions is the questioning of the very status of human identity and the emergence of declared animal identities. In analytical practice, we increasingly encounter young people — self‑identifying as Therians — who, in a lasting and consistent manner, define themselves not as human beings but as animal beings. In the case of Therian, this does not concern a transient metaphor or the symbolic language of adolescence, but a structural experience of oneself in the categories of another species. It is expressed in autobiographical narrative, in the manner of organizing relationships with the environment, and in forms of bodily expression — at times also through elements of attire brought into the analytical space, which constitute for the Analysand an integral part of their authentic “Self.”
In cases of therianthropic identification, the expression of identity is not limited to elements of dress or symbolic props. It often also encompasses patterns of behavior characteristic of a given animal species: modes of movement — including walking on four limbs rather than two — specific facial expressions, vocalization, bodily posture, and forms of reaction typical of an animal organization of experience. These behaviors are not performative or occasional in character; they constitute an integral element of the lived “self” and are treated by young people as an adequate mode of being in the world. This phenomenon directs reflection toward the question of the boundaries of human subjectivity, the relationship between the instinctual and symbolic dimensions, and the manner in which the psyche seeks forms of expression for experiences that find no adequate place within prevailing cultural models of identity. For Therians, their identity is therefore not merely a matter of subcultural belonging, but a signal of a deeper shift in the way identity and corporeality are experienced.
In many cases today, attempts at self‑definition among young people are carried out through the body — in a vivid, visible, and irreversible manner. Gender transition, the adoption of an animal mode of being, and, at times, permanent bodily modifications such as tattoos, become not only forms of expression but spaces in which the question “Who Am I?” is inscribed into the materiality of the body. Identity is then not merely a declaration or a narrative, but a somatic event.
Another area concerns difficulties related to cultural, national, and linguistic identity. Children and adolescents are born in one country and within a specific cultural order, and then — together with their parents or independently — migrate to other states as economic emigrants or as war‑related and political refugees. They grow up within a new educational system, learn in a language other than their native tongue, and function among peers possessing a different cultural capital, different symbolic references, and different historical narratives. Their identity is formed between languages, between cultures, between contradictory orders of collective memory. What is at stake here is not merely adaptation, but a fundamental question of belonging and of the possibility of integrating experiences stretched between different worlds of meaning. The current global economic situation, linked to increasing disparities in living standards between Europe and its immediate neighborhood, combined with the defensive war in Ukraine ongoing for four years, significantly intensifies tensions around the cultural, national, and linguistic identities of children and adolescents, introducing them into experiences of uncertainty of belonging and displacement already at early stages of development.
Contemporary digital technologies also significantly modify the conditions of identity formation among children and adolescents, intensifying its instability and fragmentation. Constant presence in virtual environments fosters the multiplication of roles, masks, and images of the “Self” that function in parallel, often without the possibility of symbolic linkage. Algorithmically shaped social‑media spaces reinforce comparison, the pressure of immediate self‑expression, and dependence on external validation, weakening processes of inner integration of experience. At the same time, the development of artificial intelligence and interactive generative technologies undermines traditional boundaries between subject and tool, author and product, exerting a particular impact on young people whose sense of agency and continuity of the “Self” remains in the process of formation. In this sense, technologies are not merely an external context, but an active factor co‑creating the contemporary identity crisis.
All these dimensions — bodily, instinctual, cultural, linguistic, and technological — do not develop linearly. They overlap, collide, and mutually complicate one another, creating configurations that exceed classical developmental models and require deepened analytical reflection.
In this context, the location of the conference acquires particular significance. As indicated by the author cited above — Jacek Dobrowolski — Poet, Literary Critic, Translator, Anglicist, and expert on the symbolism of Warsaw’s history and of its coat of arms — the city has for several centuries been inscribed into the problematics of gender and of relations between the human and the animal. Following the incorporation of the Duchy of Mazovia, whose principal city was Warsaw, into the Kingdom of Poland in 1526, the municipal coat of arms underwent an officially recorded change consisting in a transformation of the sex of the symbolic figure. The male Żmij — an ancient Slavic figure of a draconic deity with a human torso and a reptilian tail, associated with a protective function — was replaced by the Mermaid, a female figure retaining an animal tail. The change concerned exclusively the sex of the figure; the animal form was preserved. This fact was permanently inscribed into the heraldic and legal order of the city. This historically documented transformation constitutes one of the earliest examples of the cultural institutionalization of a change of sex of a figure representing a community while simultaneously preserving a therianthropic component. The symbolism of Warsaw’s coat of arms is therefore not a historical curiosity, but testimony to the long‑standing persistence of tensions between the human and animal elements, which today return in the experiences of children and adolescents.
The identity problematics addressed by the theme of the conference have for half a millennium been inscribed into the symbolism of the city. Already five hundred years ago, the issue of gender and sex change and therianthropy was fixed in the figure of Warsaw’s patron — the Mermaid, a being combining the feminine and animal dimensions (half woman, half fish). This heraldically sanctioned form, preserving tension between the human and the animal, has for centuries co‑constituted the identity of the city. In this sense, the symbolism of Warsaw remains in meaningful correspondence with the contemporary experiences of young people who, in the analytical space — sweeping the floor of the psychoanalytic consulting room with an attached animal tail — manifest their lived identity as something more than metaphor or costume, openly challenging the boundaries of human identification.
From the perspective of Analytical Psychology, the therian movement leads toward the problematics of animalitas — the archetypal dimension of the psyche that Jung located at the very foundations of human experience. Animalitas encompasses instinct, drive, affect, and primordial forms of relationality, constituting the living substratum of the process of individuation. Contemporary therianthropic identifications actualize this dimension in a radical manner, introducing tension between the instinctual depth of the psyche and culturally shaped forms of subjectivity.
In contemporary times, children, adolescents, and young adults, struggling with broadly understood identity issues, enact acts of transgression — questioning their own sex, cultural belonging, and at times even species belonging itself. This transgression may be understood as an attempt to transcend given qualities in search of a more adequate form of one’s own existence. Through such emphatic posing of identity questions, young people introduce a significant impulse into contemporary culture, dislodging it from entrenched schemas of understanding the human being and their place in the world. In this sense, the experiences of young people approach the problematics of a Copernican‑type revolution within reflection on identity: they shift the point of reference, reorganize existing conceptual frameworks, and demand a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and the order in which that subject is situated. They also remind all of us — including those who long ago crossed the threshold of adulthood — that we are not merely the sum of roles we perform, that we are not exhausted by the Persona, by gender and physically ascribed sex, or even by a stable definition of humanity. Their questions touch the foundations of our anthropology and direct us toward renewed reflection on who we are. Perhaps the question “Who Am I?” is no longer the question of the young generation alone, but a shared task.
From the perspective of the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, these phenomena require an approach that does not strive for rapid synthesis or normative resolution. Jung’s Theory of Complexes, rooted in the concept of the autonomy of the psyche, makes it possible to understand fragmentation as a response to experiences exceeding the integrative capacities of the individual. Contemporary concepts of trauma, PTSD, and C‑PTSD find in this Theory of Complexes an important theoretical foundation, allowing psychic wounds to be thought not as deficits but as structures organizing experience. Jung consistently emphasized that psychic transformation does not occur through the abolition of conflict, but through the long‑term capacity to contain within oneself the tension arising from inner conflict between opposites. In a culture oriented toward immediacy and rapid discharge of tension, the question of the possibility of such a process becomes particularly actual.
The experiences brought by children, adolescents, and young adults are in this sense not merely problems requiring solution. They also constitute an important contribution to reflection on the condition of the contemporary human being. Perhaps it is precisely through the experiences of young people that questions of our identity return today as one of the central questions of our shared human condition.