ISTP 2026 Conference
“Theorizing in Dark Times – Art, Narrative, Politics”
June 8 – June 12, 2026 | Brooklyn, NY, USA
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Panel: Rethinking Experience: Voice, Temporality, and Meaning in Psychology Location: North Hall 107* link to join Session Chair: Klaus Nielsen | |
| Presentation 3 | |
The Psychology of Allegories in Dark Times FU Berlin Allegories, understood as emergent Gestalten composed of multiple metaphors, offer a distinctive semiotic technology for linking subjective experience to sociocultural orders. Building on cultural-psychological accounts of symbolic action, semiotic mediation, and the dialogical self, this proposal introduces Allegory Analysis (AA) as a rigorously theorized, practice-ready method for scientific research and artistic intervention. AA treats verbald allegories not only as interpretive creative objects but as mediating devices that organize ambivalence, surface multivoiced positions, and reconfigure meaning making. In times of crisis – when experience is saturated with uncertainty and the unsayable – AA operates as artistic-scientific tool: it crafts alternative narratives, estranges the “given,” and renders visible, the hyper-generalized assumptions that sustain power and normalize suffering. By staging counter-narratives and understanding human meaning-making through the analysis of their verbal metaphors and allegories, AA tests and contests assumptions, opening conceptual space for theoretical innovation about human experience and cultural-political realities. Methodologically, the pitch outlines how AA elicits, maps, and analyzes literal allegorical material; clarifies criteria for identifying emergent structure beyond single metaphors; and specifies transformation markers at the levels of feeling, positioning, and action. The contribution is twofold: (1) a consolidated theoretical framework for allegories within cultural psychology, and (2) a demonstration of AA as a transformative technique that advances theory through aesthetically grounded inquiry, especially under conditions of social, political, or clinical crisis. In sum, AA is not merely reflective; it is a mode of theory-building that reorganizes imagination and, with it, the possible. | |

