26-29 August 2027 – Warsaw, Poland
Coniunctio Europae:
Alchemy of Conflict, Dialogue of Souls
7. Europejski Kongres Psychologii Analitycznej, 26-29 sierpnia 2027 - Warszawa, Polska
The idea of coniunctio occupies a central place in the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, rooted in the alchemical tradition as an image of the union of opposites that conditions psychic transformation. Coniunctio implies time, process, and responsibility – both on the individual and the collective level – and manifests itself with particular intensity at moments of historical transition, when established structures of meaning lose their stability.
Against the background of the contemporary world, the question arises whether a culture marked by immediacy, acceleration, and the avoidance of frustration still allows room for the alchemical furnace – understood as the prolonged endurance of the inner Alchemical Conflict of opposites. At the interpersonal level, the question of Alchemical Conflict emerges as a problem of the possibility of forming relationships under conditions of profound difference; the Dialogue of Souls constitutes the perspective within which such relationality may be thought. The present historical moment radicalises this challenge. A war that has persisted for four years on European soil, armed conflicts on its borders and beyond, mass migrations, and escalating political and social tensions together create a condition of prolonged instability. In this context, coniunctio presents itself as a question of whether it remains possible to sustain meaning and relationship where conflict becomes a permanent dimension of reality. Since 2009, six European Analytical Congresses have gradually shaped a shared field of reflection within the Jungian community, in which clinical experience, theoretical thought, and historical context have remained in living dialogue. The Seventh European Congress provides a framework for the continuation of this reflection under conditions of a profoundly transformed social and political reality.
By situating the Congress at the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, the reflection developed in the course of the proceedings is placed within the legacy of the Copernican revolution, understood as a paradigmatic shift that reorganized the conceptual framework of the cosmos and the position of the human subject within its order. The Copernican shift initiated a lasting transformation of the modern order of knowledge. In an analogous sense, Carl Gustav Jung’s Analytical Psychology introduces a comparable paradigmatic shift within modern reflection on the human being. Jung challenged the reduction of the human psyche to causal mechanisms and affirmed the autonomy of the psyche as a reality expressed through symbols, images, and processes of transformation.
For the first time, the European Analytical Congress will take place in Central Europe. The first two congresses were held in cities of Eastern Europe, the subsequent four in Western Europe. Thirty-seven years ago, in 1989, Warsaw became the centre of a process that constituted a Copernican-type breakthrough in the political and social order. The Round Table negotiations, conducted between February and April 1989 in Warsaw and its immediate surroundings, led to agreements between the authorities of communist Poland and representatives of the democratic opposition. The Round Table agreements enabled the first partially free elections in the post-war history of the countries of the Eastern Bloc and initiated a series of peaceful transformations in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The breakthrough of 1989 signified a paradigm shift through which the states of the region emerged from the position of satellite countries of the Soviet Union and returned to the European sphere of politics, economy, culture, and values. This process found its culmination in a political and economic coniunctio on 1 May 2004, with the accession of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – together with Malta and Cyprus – to the European Union. Synchronously with these events, Copernican-type transformations were also taking place in other parts of the world – for example in South Africa and in the countries of South America – where oppressive systems were being dismantled and space was opening for new forms of political and social order.
Parallel to social and political transformations, recent decades have brought profound reformulations of the ways in which interpersonal relationships, gender, and identity are experienced. The categories organising difference, subjectivity, and relatedness are undergoing long-term transformations, inscribed within changing symbolic configurations that are often deprived of shared frameworks of meaning. In this context, the Congress opens a space for reflection on how Analytical Psychology may conceptualise transformation with regard to these ongoing processes, and on what forms of coniunctio may be articulated as relational tasks requiring endurance, responsibility, and the capacity to remain within ambivalence.
Analytical Psychology currently faces the task of responding to experiences of mass and individual trauma inscribed in the order of the contemporary world. Where inner conflict remains unconscious and is not taken up within symbolic work, it loses its alchemical dimension and becomes vulgarised through acting out. In recent years, we have observed how conflicts originating in the Collective Unconscious are transferred into the sphere of action in the form of collective destruction, in which unconsciously experienced separation anxiety is transformed into bloody war. At stake remains the possibility of the Dialogue of Souls: the capacity to sustain relationship where difference, historical experience, and memory constitute an extreme burden. The thought of C.G. Jung, rooted in symbol, process, and relationality, remains an essential point of reference for reflection on the conditions of possibility for building dialogue in the presence of severe social and personal trauma.
The choice of Warsaw as the venue of the Seventh European Analytical Congress introduces into this reflection an additional dimension, rooted in the experience of history, destruction, and the possibility of reconciliation. Warsaw is a phoenix-city, rebuilt from ashes. During the Second World War, it became one of the most radical examples of the intentional destruction of cities, deliberately and methodically burned, house by house. The post-war reconstruction of Warsaw marks a transition toward a contemporary dimension of Coniunctio Europae: a breakthrough that breaks with the paradigms of the two totalitarianisms that devastated Europe in the twentieth century – Nazism and communism.
After the war, the reconstruction of Warsaw began as a collective national undertaking, with the entire society taking part in the rebuilding effort. What emerged was not merely a restored city, but a reconstituted civic organism shaped by resilience and shared responsibility. Today, Warsaw is a dynamic European metropolis – a centre of science and academic research, political life, international business, major corporations, and technological innovation. At the same time, it sustains a vibrant cultural landscape in which contemporary art, theatre, music, and independent creative communities coexist with reconstructed historic districts and monumental public architecture.
In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Warsaw became the central hub of nationwide support for refugees fleeing the full-scale war. The city served as the principal point of arrival, transit, and assistance for hundreds of thousands of people seeking safety. From the earliest days of the invasion, Warsaw coordinated humanitarian aid, medical and psychological support, temporary accommodation, legal assistance, and onward transport to other regions of Poland and across Europe. Civil society, municipal institutions, non-governmental organisations, and individual citizens mobilised in an unprecedented wave of solidarity.
Coniunctio Europae materialises today on the social plane as a community in which life, work, and relationships develop beyond the borders of states and national divisions. From this perspective, multilingualism and the transnational circulation of thought – already present in the epoch of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish polymath of German descent, a loyal subject of the Polish kings, who spoke German in everyday life and wrote in Latin – constitute enduring dimensions of the European cultural experience. An analogous transnational cultural vector is evident in the figure of Frédéric Chopin, deeply connected to Warsaw as the place of his upbringing and formative years, while at the same time born into and raised within a Polish-French family. To this constellation also belongs coniunctio in its analytical form: the first professional, systematic clinical training in Analytical Psychology in Poland, initiated in Warsaw in the second half of the 1990s and conducted by British and American Analysts, who shaped the First Generation of Polish Jungian Analysts.
The meeting of Analysts from Europe and other parts of the world will constitute an analytical Coniunctio – a form of shared thinking rooted in the European tradition of reflection on psyche, culture, and history. In this context, questions focus on how Alchemy of Conflict and the Dialogue of Souls may be understood and practised today in social, personal, relational, and collegial dimensions.
E-mail: warsaw@iaap2027.eu