Psychoanalysis, Spiritual and Logical Dimensions

September 23, 2026 - September 27, 2026
SFU, UBC, UCW

626 West Pender Street
Vancouver
Canada

Organisers:

University of Canada West

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Details

This workshop explores the intersections between psychoanalysis, spirituality, and logic, with particular attention to how each domain articulates different forms of meaning, truth, and subjectivity.

Psychoanalysis has long engaged with questions that exceed empirical description: desire, unconscious structures, symbolic formations, and the limits of rational articulation. Spiritual traditions, in turn, often address experiences that resist formalization, invoking transcendence, faith, and transformation. Logic, by contrast, has historically been associated with clarity, structure, and formal rigor.

Rather than treating these domains as mutually exclusive, this workshop invites contributions that examine their tensions, overlaps, and possible integrations. What forms of reasoning emerge when unconscious processes, spiritual experience, and logical structures intersect? Can logic account for the paradoxes found in psychoanalytic and spiritual discourse? Or do these domains reveal limits internal to logical systems themselves?

We welcome papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

The logical structure of psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., desire, lack, repetition, the unconscious)

Paradox, contradiction, and negation in psychoanalysis and spirituality

The role of language in shaping psychic and spiritual experience

Psychoanalysis and religious experience: convergence or irreducibility

Formal versus non-formal reasoning in therapeutic and spiritual practices

The limits of rationality in relation to faith, belief, and subjectivity

Logic and the symbolic: from classical systems to alternative logics

Embodiment, affect, and their resistance to formalization

We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches that bring together philosophy, psychoanalysis, religious studies, cognitive science, and related fields.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words via the conference website:

https://5wocolor.com/

When submitting, please indicate that your paper is intended for the workshop “Psychoanalysis, Spiritual and Logical Dimensions.”

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