Changes of all kinds are happening and new challenges emerging at such speed that it sometimes seems that we don´t have the time to take stock, to meet the challenges intrinsic to the changes, to digest, metabolize, process and understand them. At times it appears that we are sailing in stormy weather, looking for our North star while wrestling with the birth of what seems like a new paradigm, one that lacks pre-conceptions of conscious and unconscious expectations of what it is to be human in the future.

Destructiveness manifests itself again in the crudest and most visible form as well as in sophisticated and hidden ways: war on our doorstep, nuclear threats, energy crisis, terrorism in its many forms, the ecological disaster, corruption. The proliferation of voyeristic pleasures and public exposure on internet platforms that act as a substitute for true intimacy. A greedy creation of new forms of acting out the unconscious fantasies. An epidemic of addiction and abuses of all kind and a fetish attraction to consumerism. The falsification of reality and spread of conspiracy theories leading to a so called post truth culture, in the service to seduce, manipulate and to polarise, and so undermine the fundamental values of our societies. The rapid development of AI, artificial intelligence with a tremendous potential to do good but simultaneously if unregulated, with a tremendous potential to do harm in its attempt to clone all that is human without being human.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy has developed different modalities over time. The EFPP believes that we can be more open minded to creatively contemplate the cooperation between the different psychoanalytic modalities without undermining the depth that the examination and understanding of the unconscious offers us. The EFPP has a unique organisational structure in which four sections that cover the different modalities psychoanalytic psychotherapy have organiscally grown and coexist: Adults, Child and Adolescent, Group, Couple and Family. These various modalities have co-existed in parallel and cooperated in various ways under the umbrella of the EFPP. We came to realize over time that we must create spaces such as this Conference, for dialogue, relatedness, tolerance, mutual knowledge. Creative collaboration, which also implies respectful assessment and trust in the work of our colleagues is not to forsake the dynamic and approach of the individual section but to develop a broader vision of psychoanalytic psychotherapy which recognizes that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

We couldn’t find a better European setting than Warsaw as a meeting place. Warsaw named the Phoenix City for its ability to regenerate itself from the ashes and devastation after the war. The Host city Warsaw, considered one of the most livable cities in Europe, is one of the main economic, financial and cultural centers of Eastern Europe. The historic city center was declared a World Heritage Site in 1980.