Alexander The Great’s Trust in Doctor Philip, Henryk Siemiradzki (1870)
The New Imago Forum is an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic conference. It carries forward the tradition begun in 1912 by Sigmund Freud, when he founded Imago, a journal for psychoanalysis in relation to other fields. The New Imago Forum began as an outreach by the British Psychoanalytical Society to universities in 2007 and has since grown into a long-standing annual meeting of clinicians and academics in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The conference aspires to create the conditions for deep and sustained interdisciplinary dialogue, combining formal papers and extended discussions between presenters and participants on a particular theme.
Following previous successful conferences at Jesus College, Oxford (2012-2019) and King’s College London (2023-2025), the 2026 New Imago Forum will take place at the University of Essex and return to its popular residential weekend format, providing further opportunities for discussion and social gathering outside of the formal conference programme. The 2026 conference will be sponsored, in part, through a collaboration with the Forum for Psychiatry and Humanities in Washington, DC.
Theme
Trust is at the root of all human endeavour, from the very earliest moments when infants reach out into their new world to the possibility of politics and the belief in the regularity of natural events. D.W. Winnicott considered the building up of trust in the mother-infant relationship a precondition for the possibility of later spontaneity, separation and independence. Likewise, Melanie Klein emphasised the importance of the infant’s trust in its internal objects and, with it, its own reparative capacities. Bion emphasised the psychoanalyst’s trust in the psychoanalytic process, which by necessity involves the ability to tolerate what is uncertain or unknown. More recently, mentalisation theorists, such as Peter Fonagy, Chloe Campbell and Elizabeth Allison, have stressed the importance of ‘epistemic trust’ not only in the context of the consulting room, but also in connection to the broader social and political sphere. The rupture of trust can be a disaster, both in the psychoanalytic clinic and in the social world—and now in the natural world as well. However, scepticism and mistrust might also have an important role to play in a period characterised by political deception, fake news and rapid technological change.
Bringing together clinicians and researchers from a range of different fields, the 2026 New Imago Forum will explore ideas about Trust in relation to clinical, social and artistic themes.
Date
Friday 11 - Sunday 13 December 2026
Location
The 2026 New Imago Forum will be meeting at the University of Essex, in conjunction with the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies. The University is set in a large park and woodland, outside of Colchester. Trains run several times per hour from London Liverpool Street (fast trains 46 minutes) to Colchester North Station, from which there is a regular bus service or taxis to campus. Private rooms in on-campus postgraduate family accommodation are included in the conference fee.
Other activities
In addition to the main conference, please note the following free-to-attend events:
- The annual meeting of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies’ Psychoanalysis Club will meet informally in the afternoon on Friday 11 December to discuss a topic of general interest (TBA).
- The Annual Freud Memorial Lecture, a long-standing collaboration between the British Psychoanalytical Society and the University of Essex, will be delivered on Friday 11 December at 5.00pm by Josh Cohen, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Emeritus Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He will speak on: ‘ The Compromised Unconscious: Ambiguity in Psychoanalysis, Art and Politics’. Conference participants are invited to meet with the speaker over dinner after the lecture.
What is included in the conference fee
Residential
- Lunches and refreshments
- Friday night buffet
- Three Course Saturday Conference Dinner
- Friday and Saturday night accommodation
Non-Residential
Concessions
Concessions are Doctoral Students, Early Career Researchers or Low Waged.
Cancellation and refund policy
Fees can only be refunded (less 25% administration charge) if a written notice of cancellation is received no less than 14 days before the course. No refund can be made after that time.