The Congress is centred on the idea of coniunctio—the alchemical union of opposites which, in Jungian Analytical Psychology, constitutes a central image of psychic transformation. Coniunctio implies duration, tension, and responsibility; it becomes particularly significant at historical moments when established symbolic orders lose coherence. In a Europe marked by war, displacement, and deepening social and political fragmentation, the symbolic dimension of conflict risks giving way to destructive enactment. Within this contemporary horizon, the Congress examines the Alchemy of Conflict and the Dialogue of Souls as possibilities for sustaining meaning and relationality under conditions of collective and individual trauma. Held in Warsaw— a city rebuilt after systematic destruction— and located at the Copernicus Science Centre, the Congress situates this reflection within the legacy of transformative paradigm shifts. In this context, Coniunctio Europae names both a psychological and a historical task: the endurance of tension and the possibility of transformation beyond catastrophe.
The Conference addresses contemporary processes of identity formation among children, adolescents, and young adults within a landscape marked by profound social, cultural, and technological upheaval. In clinical experience, identity no longer appears as a linear developmental achievement culminating in stable resolution, but as a sustained field of psychic tension. Questions of gender, sexual orientation, cultural and linguistic belonging, and even of the ontological status of the human subject emerge at increasingly early stages of life. Identity is often enacted through the body itself, rendering the question “Who am I?” not only symbolic but corporeal. Migration, war, and global mobility situate young subjects between divergent worlds of meaning, while digital technologies and artificial intelligence reshape the architecture of subjectivity, multiplying self-representations and unsettling inner continuity. From the perspective of Analytical Psychology, such phenomena call for reflection capable of sustaining ambiguity rather than foreclosing it. Jung’s theory of complexes permits fragmentation to be understood not as deficit but as structured response, situating contemporary identity tensions within a broader reconfiguration of the human image in late modernity.
