Lacan Today Conference

September 18-19 2026, Ghent University Belgium;

Lacan Today 2026

Welcome to Lacan Today Conference 2026

This conference is addressed to scholars, clinicians, artists, and researchers with a sustained and specific interest in the work of Jacques Lacan and in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in all its clinical, cultural, and social applications. To return to Lacan today is not an exercise in nostalgia, but an act of repetition in the precise psychoanalytic sense: a return that makes possible the emergence of something new. Repetition marks the insistence of a question that keeps desire in motion, drawing us back—often unexpectedly—to the place of the Real, where we risk failing both worse and better. To repeat Lacan today is therefore to think with Lacan under contemporary conditions, and to test the resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the face of present urgencies. In a world shaped by capitalism, violence, digitalization, and ecological crisis, Lacanian psychoanalysis remains a vital framework for clinical practice, cultural analysis, and social critique. Lacan Today invites contributions that rigorously engage Lacan’s teaching and its developments, and that explore how Lacanian concepts continue to illuminate psychic life, institutional practice, artistic production, and the socio-political field.

What we will discuss:

  • Conceptual, clinical, and methodological approaches within Lacanian psychoanalysis.
  • The diverse ways in which the work of Jacques Lacan is mobilized under contemporary social conditions.
  • Interdisciplinary engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis across clinical, philosophical, cultural, social, and artistic domains.
  • The use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in academic, cultural, and political critique. Critical perspectives on the limits, tensions, and impasses of Lacanian theory.
  • The deployment of Lacanian psychoanalysis in academic, cultural, and political critique, as well as critical reflections on the limits, tensions, and impasses of Lacanian theory.
  • Transformations in clinical practice in relation to shifts in subjectivity, language, and social bonds.
Who Should Attend:

This conference is intended for scholars, psychoanalytic practitioners, clinicians, and researchers working in clinical psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, the humanities, critical theory, the arts and artistic practice, as well as related interdisciplinary fields. It provides a shared platform for those committed to engaging psychoanalysis in sustained dialogue with other disciplines and practices.


Keynotes by
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    Jamieson Webster 
  •  Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City and teaches at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing(Peninusula, 2025) as well as Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022), Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia, 2018) and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine(Random House, 2013). She has written regularly for Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, as well as many psychoanalytic publications.
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    Stijn Vanheule 
  •  Stijn Vanheule is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical psychological Assessment at Ghent University since 2006. He is head of the Center for Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Ghent University and author of ‘The Subject of Psychosis – A Lacanian Perspective’ (2011), ‘Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited’ (2017) and ‘Why Psychosis is Not So Crazy’ (2024). He is Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst, member of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
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    Isabel Millar
  • Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. Her first book, based on her doctoral thesis, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence was published in 2021 in The Palgrave Lacan Series and has received acclaim from major figures in philosophy, psychoanalysis, film theory and contemporary art including Alenka Zupancic, Lorenzo Chiesa, Todd McGowan and Jake Chapman. She is currently writing her next book Patipolitics for Bloomsbury Philosophy.
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    Darian Leader 
  • Darian Leader is a renowned British psychoanalyst, known for his ability to make complex psychological topics accessible to a wide audience. With De Bezige Bij he previously published The New Black (2011), What Is Madness? (2012), and Strictly Bipolar (2013).
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    Derek Hook
  • Derek Hook is a Professor and Clinical Supervisor in Psychology at Duquesne University. He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is the author of 'Six Moments in Lacan' (2017), 'A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial' (2011) and '(Post)apartheid Conditions' (2013). Along with Calum Neill, he co-edits the Palgrave Lacan Series, and along with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill he co-edits the landmark 'Reading Lacan's Ecrits' book series. In addition, he is also the co-editor of Lacan and Race (with Sheldon George). He maintains a YouTube channel including many lectures on Lacanian psychoanalysis.
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    Bracha Ettinger
  •  Bracha Ettinger is an Israeli-French artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher based in France. Born in Mandatory Palestine, she lives and works in Paris. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concepts of the matrixial space and matrixial gaze and related concepts around trauma, aesthetics and ethics. 
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