Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Division 24
Annual Conference
April 2-4, 2027
New Orleans, Louisiana
What does it mean to be a subject who does not know where, or when, one is? This question, at once clinical, philosophical, and cultural, anchors the 2027 annual conference of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Under the theme Threshold Subjects, we invite proposals that engage the psychology of unknowing, temporal dislocation, and the experience of being caught between: between knowledge and its limits, between unraveling and remaking, between a past that will not settle and a future that will not arrive, between spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and strange.
Psychoanalysis has long understood the subject as constituted in part by what it cannot know. Repression, disavowal, foreclosure, and Nachträglichkeit, the retroactive installation of meaning into time that was lived without it, all describe a self whose relationship to knowledge and to time is irreducibly troubled. Freud's own writing on telepathy and thought transference belongs here too: a set of speculations, never fully disowned, about forms of communication and knowing that exceed the boundaries of the individual mind. Phenomenological traditions, from Husserl's account of internal time consciousness to Heidegger's analysis of concealment and to Merleau-Ponty's embodied temporality, have approached cognate questions from different angles. Spiritual, religious, and transpersonal traditions have a deep relationship with the limits of knowing and the ineffable, often framing these as fundamental for the path of awakening — the dark night and the cloud of unknowing, the Buddhist account of emptiness and non-self in which lack reveals the illusion of duality, and transcendent/non-ordinary experiences, in which the dissolution of ordinary ego-boundaries and challenges to ontological frameworks give rise to radical (usually positive) transformation. Critical theory, hermeneutics, and the human sciences more broadly have asked how ignorance is socially produced, how historical time is experienced from the margins, and how suffering that cannot yet be spoken nonetheless leaves its mark on the body, the institution, and the archive.
Contemporary culture has generated its own figures for these experiences. The digital aesthetics of liminal spaces, empty corridors, suspended interiors, the uncanny architecture of the between, have named, with surprising precision, a psychological condition that theory has long circled: the experience of threshold time, of being in transit without arrival, of a present that is neither past nor future but an unresolved remainder of both. We take this cultural moment as an invitation, not an occasion for trend chasing, but as evidence that the questions animating our conference have an urgency that extends well beyond the academy.
We are especially interested this year in proposals that hold the clinical and the theoretical together: work that thinks the body as a site where unknowing registers before it can be spoken, work that takes psychoanalytic listening itself as a method, and work that reads the history of psychology's own borders, including its historical entanglement with psychical research, as evidence of how disciplines decide what counts as knowable.
Proposals are welcome from any theoretical orientation within the human sciences. The following threads are offered as orienting suggestions rather than exhaustive categories.
Psychoanalytic accounts of repression, disavowal, and motivated unknowing; agnotology and the social production of ignorance; phenomenological analyses of concealment and bad faith; the epistemology of the unconscious; Freud on telepathy and thought transference as a limit case for what a mind can be said to know; clinical implications of structural not knowing for both analyst and analysand.
Freud's Nachträglichkeit and the retroactive constitution of meaning; Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger on lived time; Ricoeur on narrative and the emplotment of temporal experience; stuckness and the clinical problem of the patient who cannot move; social and cultural psychology of temporal precarity; acceleration, waiting, and the phenomenology of the suspended present.
Van Gennep and Turner on liminality and rites of passage; Freud's unheimlich and the return of the familiar rendered strange; object relations approaches to transitional space; hauntology and the persistence of the past in the present; the history of psychical research as a companion discourse to psychoanalysis, sharing its interest in transmission, presence, and the boundary of the individual mind; phenomenological accounts of disorientation and the crisis of spatiotemporal orientation.
What the analyst does with what cannot be known; the body as a register of what has not yet found words, including symptom, conversion, and somatic address; the ethics of interpretation under conditions of epistemic uncertainty; negative capability and the capacity to tolerate not knowing; the relationship between insight and working through; intersubjectivity and the mutual unknowing of analyst and analysand.
Mystical union and the dissolution of self in the divine, from Christian mysticism to Sufism to bhakti devotion; grace and revelation as gifts — the sacred breaking in on the self; communion as sacrament and as psychological event; ritual and rite of passage as bridges toward transcendence; apophatic theology and the discipline of unsaying, in which every name for God fails, and opens to encounter; conversion as meaning installed retroactively into a life; contemplative practices of touching the unknown known as spiritual technique.
The psychology of integration following states that unsettle basic categories of self, boundary, time, and causality; spiritual emergency and the clinical task of distinguishing expansion from crisis; psychedelic-assisted experiences and the challenges they present for current theoretical and clinical frameworks; near-death and anomalous experience as limit cases for theories of mind; the history of psychical research as an earlier attempt to hold open questions mainstream psychology later foreclosed; what it means for a discipline, and not only a subject, to be asked to expand beyond its given ontology.
Collective memory, historical trauma, and the politics of forgetting; Fanon and the colonial subject's dislocation in time and space; critical theory's account of how institutions decide what is thinkable and what is not; how institutions, disciplines, and communities inhabit their own liminal moments; the history of psychology itself as a threshold discipline between the natural and human sciences, including its long and unsettled relationship to psychical research.
Division 24
Annual Conference
April 2-4, 2027
New Orleans, Louisiana
Threshold Subjects:
Unknowing, liminal time, and the displaced subject
What does it mean to be a subject who does not know where, or when, one is? This question, at once clinical, philosophical, and cultural, anchors the 2027 annual conference of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Under the theme Threshold Subjects, we invite proposals that engage the psychology of unknowing, temporal dislocation, and the experience of being caught between: between knowledge and its limits, between unraveling and remaking, between a past that will not settle and a future that will not arrive, between spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and strange.
Psychoanalysis has long understood the subject as constituted in part by what it cannot know. Repression, disavowal, foreclosure, and Nachträglichkeit, the retroactive installation of meaning into time that was lived without it, all describe a self whose relationship to knowledge and to time is irreducibly troubled. Freud's own writing on telepathy and thought transference belongs here too: a set of speculations, never fully disowned, about forms of communication and knowing that exceed the boundaries of the individual mind. Phenomenological traditions, from Husserl's account of internal time consciousness to Heidegger's analysis of concealment and to Merleau-Ponty's embodied temporality, have approached cognate questions from different angles. Spiritual, religious, and transpersonal traditions have a deep relationship with the limits of knowing and the ineffable, often framing these as fundamental for the path of awakening — the dark night and the cloud of unknowing, the Buddhist account of emptiness and non-self in which lack reveals the illusion of duality, and transcendent/non-ordinary experiences, in which the dissolution of ordinary ego-boundaries and challenges to ontological frameworks give rise to radical (usually positive) transformation. Critical theory, hermeneutics, and the human sciences more broadly have asked how ignorance is socially produced, how historical time is experienced from the margins, and how suffering that cannot yet be spoken nonetheless leaves its mark on the body, the institution, and the archive.
Contemporary culture has generated its own figures for these experiences. The digital aesthetics of liminal spaces, empty corridors, suspended interiors, the uncanny architecture of the between, have named, with surprising precision, a psychological condition that theory has long circled: the experience of threshold time, of being in transit without arrival, of a present that is neither past nor future but an unresolved remainder of both. We take this cultural moment as an invitation, not an occasion for trend chasing, but as evidence that the questions animating our conference have an urgency that extends well beyond the academy.
We are especially interested this year in proposals that hold the clinical and the theoretical together: work that thinks the body as a site where unknowing registers before it can be spoken, work that takes psychoanalytic listening itself as a method, and work that reads the history of psychology's own borders, including its historical entanglement with psychical research, as evidence of how disciplines decide what counts as knowable.
Potential themes
Proposals are welcome from any theoretical orientation within the human sciences. The following threads are offered as orienting suggestions rather than exhaustive categories.
The subject who does not know
Psychoanalytic accounts of repression, disavowal, and motivated unknowing; agnotology and the social production of ignorance; phenomenological analyses of concealment and bad faith; the epistemology of the unconscious; Freud on telepathy and thought transference as a limit case for what a mind can be said to know; clinical implications of structural not knowing for both analyst and analysand.
Liminal time and temporal dislocation
Freud's Nachträglichkeit and the retroactive constitution of meaning; Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger on lived time; Ricoeur on narrative and the emplotment of temporal experience; stuckness and the clinical problem of the patient who cannot move; social and cultural psychology of temporal precarity; acceleration, waiting, and the phenomenology of the suspended present.
Threshold, in between, and the uncanny
Van Gennep and Turner on liminality and rites of passage; Freud's unheimlich and the return of the familiar rendered strange; object relations approaches to transitional space; hauntology and the persistence of the past in the present; the history of psychical research as a companion discourse to psychoanalysis, sharing its interest in transmission, presence, and the boundary of the individual mind; phenomenological accounts of disorientation and the crisis of spatiotemporal orientation.
Unknowing and the clinical encounter
What the analyst does with what cannot be known; the body as a register of what has not yet found words, including symptom, conversion, and somatic address; the ethics of interpretation under conditions of epistemic uncertainty; negative capability and the capacity to tolerate not knowing; the relationship between insight and working through; intersubjectivity and the mutual unknowing of analyst and analysand.
Sacred ruptures
Mystical union and the dissolution of self in the divine, from Christian mysticism to Sufism to bhakti devotion; grace and revelation as gifts — the sacred breaking in on the self; communion as sacrament and as psychological event; ritual and rite of passage as bridges toward transcendence; apophatic theology and the discipline of unsaying, in which every name for God fails, and opens to encounter; conversion as meaning installed retroactively into a life; contemplative practices of touching the unknown known as spiritual technique.
Ontological shock and expansive integration
The psychology of integration following states that unsettle basic categories of self, boundary, time, and causality; spiritual emergency and the clinical task of distinguishing expansion from crisis; psychedelic-assisted experiences and the challenges they present for current theoretical and clinical frameworks; near-death and anomalous experience as limit cases for theories of mind; the history of psychical research as an earlier attempt to hold open questions mainstream psychology later foreclosed; what it means for a discipline, and not only a subject, to be asked to expand beyond its given ontology.
Historical and collective dimensions
Collective memory, historical trauma, and the politics of forgetting; Fanon and the colonial subject's dislocation in time and space; critical theory's account of how institutions decide what is thinkable and what is not; how institutions, disciplines, and communities inhabit their own liminal moments; the history of psychology itself as a threshold discipline between the natural and human sciences, including its long and unsettled relationship to psychical research.
Submission guidelines
Individual paper proposals should include a title, a 300 word abstract and AV requirements.
Symposium proposals should include an overall title and 250 word rationale, abstracts for each paper (200 words each).
Poster proposals should include a title and a 300 word abstract.
Alternative formats including workshops, roundtables, and performative or arts-based presentations are warmly encouraged. Please include a 300 word description of the format, its rationale, and any special logistical requirements.
Proposals from graduate students are especially welcome. A limited number of travel awards are available for student presenters; please indicate your interest in the student award in your submission.
Submission deadline: December 4, 2026
Submissions: Division 24 NOLA Conference
Conference dates: April 2-4, 2027
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