INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOHISTORICAL ASSOCIATION’S
49th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

MAY 29-31, 2026 (Friday – Sunday)

Breaking Cycles of Violence: Psychohistorical Perspectives on Individual and Collective Healing

SUBTHEMES:

Understanding Individual and Collective Psychology
• The study of lives and psychobiographies
• Living in an age of AI
• Dealing with trauma and breaking cycles of transgenerational trauma
Social Divisions and Identities
• “Why Wars?”: Overcoming state violence in a dysfunctional world
• Modern social perversions: human trafficking, scapegoating, groupthink, censorship
• Generational divides: social and clinical aspects
• Migration and identity: psychohistorical dynamics of displacement and belonging
Pathways to Healing and Transformation
• Cultural healing, resilience, and positive transformation
• Social justice, human rights, and nonviolent communication
• Women and leadership in our changing world

These are the titles and abstracts of the plenary presentations, as well as the short biographies of our plenary speakers:

Benjamin Abelow, M.D.: Religion as a Response to Childhood Trauma: Transgenerational Transmission, Cultural Healing, and Psychotherapy

Abstract: In this presentation, I show that religions often portray, in the language of symbol and metaphor, patterns of mass childhood trauma, especially trauma from corporal punishment, abandonment, and neglect. These portrayals suggest that the religions (1) arose on a psychological template from childhood—analogous to a shared, waking, post-traumatic dream — and (2) may have persisted culturally because the underlying traumas continued to be widespread. I discuss the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), the Eastern karmic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism), and an ancient Greek myth associated with the Eleusinian mystery religion (the rape of Persephone).

Some of these religions embed post-traumatic behavioral repetitions and compensatory “happy endings.” Teachings about hell, which themselves can be traumatizing, may represent a symbolic variant of the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Sociologically, one can speculate that, in the face of mass childhood trauma, religions have promoted societal coherence by providing a shared post-traumatic focus, the alternative being a plethora of idiosyncratic, incompatible, socially centrifugal post-traumatic distortions and delusions. Understanding these ideas may point to a route for cultural healing, as well as a transferential “entry point” for individual self-exploration and psychotherapy. Though my focus is not political, this framework offers insight into the apocalyptic Christian influence within the U.S. government and military. Methodologically, this approach can provide an explicit framework for empirically demonstrating psycho-historical causation. Time permitting, I will also comment briefly on two “secular myths” associated with the systematically repressive child-rearing culture of late-modern Germany: Schopenhauer’s philosophy of Will, and Nazism.

Short Bio of the Presenter: Benjamin Abelow has a B.A. in European history from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.D. from the Yale School of Medicine, where he also served as Lecturer in Medicine. For the past 25 years he has studied how religions and myths can reflect patterns of endemic childhood trauma in their cultures of origin and persistence. His peer-reviewed writings can be found on Academia (https://independent.academia.edu/BAbelow), and he is now completing a book for a general non-fiction audience. He also has published two medical texts and a book on the geopolitics of the Ukraine war, all viewable on Amazon. Ben Abelow can be reached by email at .

Juhani Ihanus, PhD: Relational psychohistory, trauma, and memory: On individual and collective life stories as healing testimonies

Abstract: In my presentation, I will argue that psychohistory is an intersubjective, transformative, and transdisciplinary field of research. Both individual and collective traumatic memories are repressed and cross borders within networks and entanglements that extend beyond stable memory archives in many directions and connections. Trauma impedes the ability to remember otherwise and access and reassess the repressed. However, trauma can also serve as a resource for memory, connecting it to personal and collective growth, as well as the development of empathy and resilience.

Relational psychohistory can be transformative, offering alternative meanings and migratory and diasporic perspectives that encourage creative dialogue about our evolving inner and outer limits. Psychohistorical material is not merely a research “object,” but rather a complex web of sources, life stories, testimonies, and voices. The affective meanings, (counter-)transferences, poetic metaphors, reveries, and reflections that arise are not solely “in the text” or “in the researcher.” Psychohistorians co-construct and re-relate psychohistorical knowledge through their subjectivity, as well as through individual and collective memories, life stories, and cultural matrices.

This co-created, intersubjective, psychohistorical, interpretive constellation is analogous to the “analytic third,” as formulated by Thomas Ogden. Through the psychohistorical “third,” individual and group dynamics can be linked with interactions involving different life stories, group fantasies, and practices across generations, nations, and cultures. Relational psychohistory is important for understanding and witnessing the impact of trauma and the healing process.

The presentation relates to two subthemes of the conference: “Understanding Individual and Collective Psychology” and “Pathways to Healing and Transformation”

Short Bio of the Presenter: Juhani Ihanus, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology and of cultural Psychology (University of Helsinki), of the history of science and ideas (University of Oulu), and of art education and art psychology (Aalto University). He is also a poet, writer, essayist, and translator. Ihanus is a pioneer of European biblio/poetry therapy and co-founded the Finnish Association for Biblio/Poetry Therapy in 1981, the first organization of its kind in Europe. He is an international member of the Psychohistory Forum. He sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, notably The Journal of Psychohistory, Clio’s Psyche, The Arts in Psychotherapy, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, and Scriptum. He has authored approximately 540 publications, including books, articles, reviews, and essays, spanning various fields such as psychology, psychohistory, the history of the human sciences, cultural studies, poetry therapy, literature, and the arts. Additionally, he has published collections of poetry and aphorisms, as well as translations from various languages into Finnish. Dr. Ihanus can be reached at .

Danielle Knafo, PhD: Gods and Monsters: The Psychoanalysis of AI

Abstract: We have always built our gods in our own image. Artificial intelligence is no different, except that for the first time, the image is psychic rather than physical; it is not projected onto stone or sky but into systems that mirror our cognition, speak in our syntax, and simulate our care. In AI, our fantasies of omnipotence and our secret appetite for annihilation are rendered in silicon and code. This paper takes that doubling seriously. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical theories, it argues that embodiment, interiority, and intersubjectivity are not problems awaiting a technological solution but the very conditions under which meaning, relationship, and genuine transformation become possible. What is at stake when psychoanalysis is replaced by algorithmic simulation is therefore not a technical question but a structural one, not an upgrade but a foreclosure of the human as such. The paper begins by treating mortality as the enemy. It ends by recognizing it as the ground of everything worth preserving. 

Short Bio of the Presenter: Danielle Knafo, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, a professor and author. Currently she is faculty and supervisor at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs. Dr. Knafo is a popular lecturer and prolific writer. She has written 10 books and dozens of articles and art essays. Her areas of expertise are: art and creativity, trauma and psychosis, sex and gender, and, recently, technology and AI. Just a few titles demonstrate her range and interdisciplinary approach: Egon Schiele: The Creation of a Self; In Her own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in Twentieth-Century Art; Living with Terror: Working with Trauma; Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art; The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Art and Psychoanalysis; The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis. She conducts writing groups for psychoanalysts and serves as an independent writing consultant. Dr Knafo maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, New York. More information can be found on her website https://danielleknafo.com/.

Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD: Where Hope Lies: Breaking the Cycle of Violence from Within

Abstract:

We live in a moment of proliferating hostility — political polarization that no longer seeks to understand, only to defeat; the speed with which disagreement becomes contempt; the ways people withdraw, harden, or strike out when they feel unseen or threatened. We know a great deal about what is going wrong. We know considerably less about where hope actually lies.

This keynote argues that hope is not found in the elimination of suffering — that is not within our control — but in something both more modest and more demanding: the human capacity to transform suffering rather than transmit it. In clinical work over several decades, the presenter has repeatedly encountered a troubling pattern: what presents as hatred — toward others or toward oneself — often conceals experiences of humiliation, invisibility, fear, or despair that have found no place to be known or shared. When those experiences remain unrecognized, they harden into grievance, contempt, and the wish to diminish others. This is one of the central mechanisms by which cycles of violence are sustained — in societies, in families, and in individual lives.

The talk explores this capacity for transformation through three figures whose lives and work illuminate different pathways through suffering: James Baldwin, George Atwood, and Anton Chekhov. Each began in circumstances marked by profound hardship and had every reason to become embittered, hardened, or withdrawn. Each, in a different way, did something else.

Baldwin transformed humiliation and racial exclusion into moral witness and a fierce, unsentimental form of love — demonstrating that the refusal to dehumanize one’s oppressor is not moral generosity but psychological necessity, and the only foundation on which a fractured world can begin to heal.

Atwood transformed devastating early loss, epistemological invalidation, and the absence of any emotional home for his grief into a lifelong commitment to accompanying others into the darkest regions of human experience — what the presenter calls being Virgil to another’s Dante. The talk draws on a psychobiography of Atwood to explore both the gift and the hidden cost of his extraordinary benevolence, and the way in which a relationship of mutual understanding across decades helped complete what suffering had left unfinished.

Chekhov transformed an authoritarian and fearful childhood — which he described as that of a “little convict” — into a practice of clear seeing without contempt, and a life of benevolence expressed not in sentiment but in concrete deeds. His lifelong effort to squeeze “the slave out of himself drop by drop” offers a model of hope that is quiet, daily, and no less demanding for its lack of drama.

Drawing on psychobiography, clinical experience, and the presenter’s own history, this keynote argues that the capacity to transform rather than transmit suffering is not a gift. It is a practice — and it is learnable.

Short Bio of the Presenter: Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in New York City and North Salem, NY. He teaches at The Object Relations Institute of NY, The American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the C. G. Jung Institute of NY. The author of eight books (Psychotherapy Case Studies: Escaping the Prison You Didn’t Know You Were In; Meditative Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Pathways to Healing and Transformation; A Psychoanalysis for Our Time; The Good Life; Psychotherapy and Buddhism; The Art of Flourishing; Meditative Psychotherapy; and Practicing Meditative Psychotherapy), he has taught at various psychoanalytic institutes and meditation and yoga centers and lectured around the country and abroad on psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis/ Buddhism/ meditation. Dr. Rubin is most interested in a pluralistic psychoanalysis that respects the genuine insights and practices from each analytic tradition and draws on the best that has been thought and said from all psychoanalytic schools as well as history, art, literature, anthropology and anything that illuminates the human condition. His pioneering approach to therapy was featured in the New York Times Magazine as “Enlightenment Therapy” (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26zen-t.html). He can be contacted at drjeffreyrubin.com or .

Save the date and join us on May 29-31, 2026 as we continue to expand the dialogue between psyche and history — seeking not only to understand the past but to imagine new pathways toward healing, justice, and peace.

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IPhA Leadership Team

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