In the late 1980s, Andrew Samuels identified three major post-Jungian lines of development in analytical psychology, namely the classical, developmental and archetypal. In recent decades, we have witnessed the emergence of a new group, affiliated with the relational psychotherapy community. The so-called intersubjective-relational turn in psychoanalysis, initiated in the 1980s by Stephen Mitchell and his circle, has since expanded into a trans-professional movement, facilitating dialogue between different therapeutic cultures. The link between the two schools seems almost natural, given that Jung's ideas about the therapeutic relationship, the epistemological position of the therapist, the implicit, non-verbal domain, the therapeutic significance of imagination and creativity, and the need for dialogue between different disciplines, anticipated in many respects the perspectives of contemporary relational psychoanalysis.

As early as the 1920s, Jung formed his idea of the mutually constructed nature of the therapeutic relationship. „By no device can the treatment be anything but the product of mutual influence, in which the whole being of the doctor as well as that of his patient plays its part. In the treatment there is an encounter between two irrational factors, that is to say, between two persons who are not fixed and determinable quantities but who bring with them, besides their more or less clearly defined fields of consciousness, an indefinitely extended sphere of nonconsciousness. Hence the personalities of doctor and patient are often infinitely more important for the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says and thinks (although what he says and thinks may be a disturbing or a healing factor not to be underestimated). For two personalities to meet is like mixing two different chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. In any effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the patient; but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal influence on the doctor. You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. […] It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smoke-screen of fatherly and professional authority. By so doing he only denies himself the use of a highly important organ of information”, he wrote in 1929 in his essay Problems of Modern Psychotherapy.

In our conference we focus on the relational and, in a broader context, the social milieu of human experience. Our inner and outer mirrors and reflections are shaped by the self and the environment that reflects on the self, whether these are our primary relationships, our material or social environment. The modern man is reflected in social media, the built environment, or even in the shaping of artificial intelligence. They affect us and we affect the world. We are responsible for our relationships, not only for the present but also for future generations.

Our conference also welcomes papers from other disciplines in addition to psychotherapy-related abstracts.