About this event

Join us for the annual IJP online conference 2026 with papers from leading psychoanalysts: John Steiner, Giuseppe Civitarese, Cecilia Taiana, and Joshua Durban. Chaired by Francis Grier, Editor-In-Chief, International Journal of Psychoanalysis

We are living in violent times, with the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and many other regions, the rise of far-right populism, cancel culture, and the mass displacement of refugees. Some external violence has entered the consulting rooms and analytic institutions. The relationship between external and internal violence is, of course, a complex, two-way current.

This conference draws together psychoanalytic reflections on myth, ethics, childhood, trauma, and poetic form, to explore the interplay between different expressions of violence – grievance and revenge, disintegration and defence, rupture and representation. At times, violence may be a call for recognition, a form of protection, an extreme defence. Sometimes, it can be transformed – sublimated into creativity, the death drive turned towards life. But sometimes, sadism can be addictive.

Four leading psychoanalysts – John Steiner, Giuseppe Civitarese, Cecilia Taiana, and Joshua Durban – examine violence in different ways: on the battlefield, in the consulting room, in infancy, in autism, and in the poetic line. The papers consider the wrath of Achilles; the autistic child who adopts cruelty as a shield; the soldier-poet who writes what cannot be said. How might violence emerge not from innate evil but a breakdown in mutual recognition, from the agony of exclusion and fear of annihilation? How might analytic technique, ethical attunement, and even literary form, help tolerate, contain, and transform extreme psychic states?

Chaired by Francis Grier, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the conference explores these vital psychoanalytic questions of our time.

John Steiner

Violence in the Wrath of Achilles: Inward as Grievance or Outward as Revenge
Both grievance and revenge are expressions of the rage that arises in response to feelings of injustice and humiliation, but they differ in the direction that the rage is expressed. Revenge is outwardly directed, usually as a violent attack, while grievance is nursed inwardly in a state of withdrawal. The wrath of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad is used to explore this theme which commonly gives rise to cycles of injury followed by rage. These may create a vertical up or down world of triumph or humiliation which is particularly intractable in times of war.

Giuseppe Civitarese

Embodied Bonds: Psychoanalytic Insights into Ethics and Violence
This paper reflects on the concept of violence in psychoanalysis, using clinical examples and a film scene to explore the idea. The central argument is that violence arises from the breakdown of mutual recognition, a fragile process where a bond between self and other is formed. This process is not fully conscious or voluntary but has an ethical impulse as primordial as it is elusive, rooted in shared belonging, as noted by Judith Butler. The paper suggests that violence does not come from an inherent malice in human nature, as Freud or Klein might argue, but from the pain of separation or being excluded from the bond. Tustin’s work is cited to show that, in early developmental states, this sense of separation feels like the disintegration of the body, rather than just a symbolic absence. The paper also discusses how the therapeutic process can help contain the anxiety arising from such extreme feelings.

Cecilia Taiana

Poetry at the Limits of Prose: The Soldier-Poet as a Figure of the Unconscious
My presentation explores how poetry emerges when prose fails in the face of war and collective trauma. Through the figure of the soldier-poet, it examines poetry as a response to extreme violence and psychic rupture, allowing access to the unconscious and the unmemorizable. Drawing on Freud’s notion of “the other scene” and the medieval practice of versiprose, this paper argues that poetry sustains what prose cannot hold—affective truth, dissonance, and fragmentation— and gives contour to what cannot yet be thought but insists on being felt.

Joshua Durban

From sensory-based violence to violent mantles in Autism
In my presentation I shall discuss the way in which Autistic individuals use violence, and later on sadism, cruelty and extreme violent, “hard” ideologies as psychic mantles. This is a way of organizing and stabilizing an influx of anxieties-of-being and osmotic anxieties resulting in fragmentation and organismic panic. I shall demonstrate the above using clinical material taken from the analyses of infants, children and young adults. Finally, I shall raise some questions concerning the analyst’s state of mind and technique.

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