This project engages collectives that open psychoanalytic spaces to excluded or marginal individuals or groups. Free psychoanalytic clinics have rich political and clinical ‘lives’, but these often remain invisible. We ask how collectives of clinicians invested in the social mission of psychoanalysis innovate, by putting time, space, money, and suffering in new relations. We think through these new relations in terms of ‘mental health commons’ and ‘clinical ecologies’.
Free psychoanalytic clinics have existed since Sigmund Freud’s time. They have been laboratories of political experimentation, expanding the scope of what psychoanalysis has to offer to the mental health field and to collective life. We trace the metamorphoses of Freud’s couch, which happen when psychoanalysis becomes entangled with emancipatory movements and liberation struggles of various kinds, and engages with the realities of social inequalities based on race, class, gender, poverty, and other forms of marginalization.
We aim to produce a new global figuration of psychoanalysis as a critical and progressive discourse and practice, starting from free clinics, and exploring their profound influence on mental health, inequality, and the social bond.
Our work combines a multi-sited psychosocial ethnography of contemporary free clinics, critical historical research, and arts methods, across seven main sites: Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires.
We will share our work in conferences, seminars, publications, blog posts, and various publicly engaged activities.
Our project is funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Grant (ERC Consolidator Grant guarantee).
Our research unfolds across four themes.
Progressive Clinical Cultures and Contemporary Practices
Witnessing as Paradigm for Society
Archiving the Free Clinic: An Archive for the Present
