Talk at the launch of the special issue 24(3) of Psychoanalysis & History of December 2022, on ‘Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’, The Freud Museum, February 25th 2023
It is my honour to join you in celebrating the publication of ‘Psychoanalysis for the People’, a special issue of Psychoanalysis and History edited by Joanna Ryan, Raluca Soreanu, and Matt ffytche.
But wait: a psychoanalysis for the people? For whom else would it be, or to whom else would it possibly belong? Why was psychoanalysis invented if not to care for the speaking subject, each speaking subject, in their fragile existence between the singularity of a lived experience and the universality of our being?
In fact, is it not ‘the people’ who make and reinvent psychoanalysis? Is its theory not constructed in response to listening to human suffering, whatever its source, as it is expressed in the margins of the speakable? Does psychoanalysis not emerge in the demand by people to be heard? Is it not called into creation to assist wherever people desire truth? Is it not practiced by people who have been moved beyond themselves by a passion for the being of the human?
I am happy to say that this special issue upends the tired presuppositions that have twisted the very notion of a ‘psychoanalysis for the people’ into a contradiction in terms.
In the pages of this issue, practitioners, activists, historians, and theorists describe their work in free and low-cost clinics, demonstrating how ‘a psychoanalysis for the people’ is neither a mutation of its fundamental aims nor an extension of its original capacities. In theory and intention, psychoanalysis has always been for the people, even if, in practice, it has often fallen short of this ideal. In fact, we can say that a psychoanalysis that is not for all people is not a psychoanalysis at all. This point is driven home by example after example of collectives in which psychoanalysts, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and patients work together to experiment with institutional models of analytic care. Not only do they explore the universality of psychoanalysis’ potential, but just as profoundly, they reshape our very conception of ‘the people’.
The free or low-cost clinics that you will read about in the special issue and which are the focus of the FreePsy project, are located around the world; some have now been shuttered; others have taken new forms; many of them have been founded in the last ten years. As important as the description of their practices, are the clinicians’ accounts of the financial, political, and therapeutic challenges they face in realizing their aims. These variegated challenges arise because these projects are all equally dedicated to receiving the unconscious in places, and in subjects, who have otherwise been barred access to the ear of the analyst, people whose speech is perforated by experiences of structural violence, and whom the forces of state and capital have excommunicated to the thresholds of culture — whether in the barrios of North Philadelphia, amongst the poor in Rio de Janeiro, or to the psychosocial peripheries of London.
In bringing these accounts together, this issue invites us to reflect anew on Elizabeth Ann Danto’s work on the early history of free and low-cost clinics, which were established by Freud’s followers in Europe between the first and second world wars. These public-facing clinics grew out of a soil violently tilled by the experience of total war, fertilized by the growing symptoms of life under industrial capitalism, and harvested by the ideas of a progressive universalism that once emboldened the Freudian cause. It took a mixture of fascism, genocide, and the monster of unfree markets to bring this first history to an end.
Are we not now living a certain repetition of these circumstances: surrounded by new, interminable wars, afflicted by the new miseries of consumer capitalism, and — amidst new political movements against racial violence and ecological collapse — facing the same battle for the right to the human? Where does the psychoanalysis of our times stand? Where must it stand and reinvent itself to remain psychoanalysis — to remain, for the people, on the side of truth?
But this special issue, in tracking what we could call a second or contemporary history of psychoanalysis’ free or low-cost clinics, forces us to recognize a difference in this historical repetition, and a radical discontinuity between the ‘people’ our authors speak about and the ‘people’ served by Freud and his followers in their time.
After all, before four years of total war in Europe awoke analysts’ senses to the urgency of making psychoanalysis available to all, several centuries of human extermination outside the metropole had hardly moved a conscience to action. I will restate the obvious: Freud and his followers’ notion of the ‘people’, and the forms of ‘discontent’ they lived, suffered from a racially and geopolitically blinkered notion of ‘civilization’. Current efforts to expand psychoanalysis to the people who were once excluded from the imagined community of civilization, whether they live within or outside of Europe, will inevitably shake psychoanalysis to its core — and from its core, renew its theoretical and clinical stakes. That is because the inscription of the histories of colonialism and slavery on the bodies of these ‘other’ subjects reveal symptoms that do not neatly fit into our received theoretical categories and do not suggest any obvious course of therapeutic action. The subjective consequences of the crisis of identity and authority in parts of the Euro-American social bond are not the same as the subjective consequences wrought by the violent destruction of social bonds. The wholesale replacement of cultural lifeworlds, the methodical liquidation of populations, the systematic erasure of names, the randomized murder of family members, and the private and public refusal to recognize these modes of ontological dispossession: these are the features that characterize the experience of the colonial and postcolonial world, the ‘black holocaust’ of the transatlantic slave system, and the global afterlives of these linked historical ruptures.
So, while it looks back to draw important lessons, this issue of Psychoanalysis and History is fundamentally oriented toward the here and the now, where the effects of these historical ruptures are at stake; these community-oriented clinics respond to a crisis that the histories of capitalism and psychoanalysis have always had in common.
In light of these stakes, I ask you not to read these articles as ‘feel-good’ stories about a benevolent lay-clergy distributing therapeutic alms to the needy masses. Rather, and like the editors note, these are snapshots of clinical and political laboratories: ones that 1) advance analytic knowledge in response to different forms of psychosocial catastrophe, on the one hand, and that 2) invent new institutional arrangements as an alternative to the regimes of silence that govern everyday life, on the other. These clinics, in other words, activate the dialectic between the ethical and the political, between action and production, praxis and poiesis.
Take, for instance, the USEMI project, which serves Black and ethnic minority populations in London, and that raises fundamental questions about how the lived experience of racial violence troubles the phenomenological and nosological distinction between neurosis and psychosis.
Or take the Institute of Complexity Studies in Rio de Janeiro, which implements a ‘single pot device’ to redistribute the costs of care provision among patients and therapists, thus instituting a mode of symbolic exchange within the clinical space that is actively contrapuntal to the logics of the market.
Or think of the new modes of group therapy that are being implemented at the ‘Testimony Clinic’ in Sao Paolo to symbolize symptoms caused by encounters with state violence, a type of conflict whose symbolic structure limits the degree to which it can be expressed transferentially in the ‘traditional’ form of the analyst-patient dyad.
Gathering reports of these very different clinical experiments together under one roof, this journal issue succeeds in walking a delicate line between its two stated aims: the first being to retell the history of the present of psychoanalysis, and the second to convey, in as undistorted a way as possible, the diversity of the theories and practices pursued by these new forms of psychoanalysis for the people: or, as the editors put it in their own words, the aim it to ‘find a modality of inscription […] for a set of practices that are as old as psychoanalysis itself’, and to communicate these stories ‘as far as possible in the idioms and ad hoc terms in which they originate’1.
The FREEPSY project’s larger ambition is to create an ‘International Free Clinics Network’ in the coming years. To that end, this issue of a ‘Psychoanalysis for the People’ is more than a document of psychoanalysis’ progressive activities: it is the cornerstone for a project to progress psychoanalysis, to make it a better theory and to inform a more effective therapeutic practice. These articles therefore constitute an archive in service of the future, a first step in creating new alliances in the political spirit of psychoanalysis’ full history, the start of a network that we might imagine as something like a ‘free association of places of free association’.
With that hint at what is yet to come, I conclude with words from one of the issue’s contributors, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, where she reflects on her experience working with analysands at the Psychosis Therapy Project she founded here in London. Bonnigal-Katz ends with this stirring affirmation of what psychoanalysis offers the people: ‘whatever the future holds, however broken your life or your spirit might be, creativity is the best antidote to death’ ( Bonnigal-Katz, 2022, p. 333)2.
1Soreanu, R., Ffytche, M. and Ryan, J., (2022). Psychoanalysis for the People: Interrogations and Innovations. Psychoanalysis and History. 24 (3), 253-267
2Bonnigal-Katz, Dorothée (2022) The Truthfulness of a ‘Sympathetic Ear’: Working with Psychosis in the Community. Psychoanalysis and History. 24 (3), 329-333.
