The tenth ESTD congress: Lisbon, 1–3 October, with the whole programme already public

Dissociation is the corner of trauma practice where the public conversation and the clinical one have drifted furthest apart. In one direction the diagnosis is claimed far past anything the criteria support. In the other, a patient in an ordinary trauma case goes absent mid-session and nobody in the room names it. A congress does not close that gap, but it is the one place where the people holding the evidence have to argue in front of each other, and this year the argument is legible before the doors open.

What is on the programme, and where it disagrees with itself

The scientific programme was last updated on 10 August 2026 and runs to 65 pages. Seven pre-conference workshops fill the daytime of 1 October, in half-day and full-day formats, and the congress opens the same evening at 18:00 with Loewenstein's plenary. Across the three days it carries 6 plenary lectures, 9 symposia, 28 workshops, 15 single-paper sessions, 2 discussion groups and 63 posters, in parallel streams at Culturgest. Everything is in English.

The most useful thing about it is that it does not agree with itself. Richard J. Loewenstein's plenary reports the project he was commissioned to co-edit with Catherine G. Fine in 2020, which grew into a book-length volume; his abstract positions EMDR, mindfulness and body-oriented therapies as "adjunctive techniques, not treatments for DID", and argues that high trait hypnotizability leaves these patients vulnerable to decompensation when such methods are used before stabilisation. Another plenary, by Olivier Piedfort-Marin, is on when and how to use EMDR in severe dissociative disorders. Two experienced clinicians, one programme, and a genuine disagreement about sequencing that no smoothed-over paragraph would show you.

The counterweight to over-claiming sits in the same room. George Bonanno's plenary argues that the correlates of resilient outcomes "show uniformly small effects and say little about who will actually be resilient and who not", and relocates resilience in flexible self-regulation rather than a short list of protective traits. Benedetto Farina asks whether traumatic disintegration, detachment and dissociation are three strands of a single braid. Lora Dimitrova presents brain and behavioural measures of identity fragmentation, Frances Waters works on children and youth, and the poster hall includes work on identifying dissociative-subtype PTSD from resting-state amygdala connectivity.

What it costs, and what to do if you are not going

The live deadline is the one to note this week. Early bird closed on 29 July 2026, so registration now sits in the standard band, which runs until 31 August 2026: 520.00 € for ESTD members and 620.00 € for non-members. From 1 September the late rate applies until 1 October 2026, at 560.00 € and 660.00 €. All figures include Portuguese VAT at 23%. Pre-congress workshops on 1 October are an extra 150.00 € at the standard stage for participants attending on site.

There are real reductions, with real limits. ESTD members from the countries the site lists as low-income – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia and others – pay 270.00 € at the standard stage, and members from the listed middle-income countries pay 370.00 €; the site limits those reduced places to a maximum of 200 persons. Students in medical, psychology or counselling programmes without a first degree and under 26 pay 150.00 €. Psychology trainees and psychiatry residents can take an online-only place at 150.00 €, but the site says that to attend on site they should register at full price. Online access streams only the halls selected for streaming, and selected lectures and workshops stay available from day 14 to day 90 after the congress.

If you are not going, download the programme anyway. It is free, needs no account, and it is the most honest survey of what this field is currently working on that you will read in an hour: the questions people brought, the populations they brought them from, and the places where senior clinicians still differ. One caveat to hold onto whichever way you go – no accreditation is stated anywhere on the site or in the document, so nothing here comes pre-counted towards a formal requirement, and whether your own body accepts self-reported external hours is a question for that body. What the congress issues is a certificate of participation.