CCEH Boardroom and LibraryExeter, Devon
Monday, June 29 • 11 AM – 3:30 PM
Register via Eventrbrite.
Part 1: 11am – 1pm
Free Psychoanalytic Clinics and Mental Health Commons: In Conversation with the FREEPSY Collective
The FREEPSY Collective: Ana Čvorović, Ana Minozzo, Ana Tomčić, Ewan O’Neill, Ivan Ward, Julianna Pusztai, Lizaveta van Munsteren and Raluca Soreanu
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 see psychoanalytic free clinics, in their plural and polyvocal manifestations, as a global movement, connected by a series of important theoretical-clinical principles, by an ethos, and by a rich set of revisions and innovations. All these innovations need to be both historicised and theorised. We place the notion of ‘infrastructures’ and ‘mental health commons’ at the heart of understanding how autonomous collectives of clinicians invested in the social mission of psychoanalysis innovate, by putting time, space, money, and suffering in new relations. Drawing on theoretical, historical, ethnographic and arts methods research, we move across three different ‘scenes’: from an alternative history of ‘DIY psychoanalysis’ practiced by the psy-movement in the 1970s in the UK, and its ideas on ‘unconsciousness raising’; to the experiments of Planned Environment Therapy, the implication of psychoanalysts in therapeutic communities in the UK, and their ideas on communal life; to the practices of contemporary free clinics in Brazil, which can be read as radical experiments in sanitary emancipation and that reshape mental healthcare, through insurgent, place-based, and decolonial frameworks. Ultimately, we ask what it means to create a psychoanalytic commons.
The session will have a participatory dimension: we share with our public and ‘activate’ a small number of archival items that are part of the Free Clinics Archive, based at the MayDay Rooms in London.
Presentations:
On Infrastructural Thinking and Mental Health Commons, by Raluca Soreanu
DIY Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in Practice, by Julianna Pusztai
Psychoanalysis, Mutuality and Society in Early Therapeutic Communities, by Ana Tomčić
Discontent and Collectivity: Free Psychoanalytic Clinics as Spaces of Sanitary Emancipation, by Ana Minozzo
Activating the Free Clinics Archive, participatory workshop led by Ewan O’Neill
Moderated by Ivan Ward (in person) and Lizaveta van Munsteren (online).
Paper abstracts:
DIY Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in Practice
Julianna Pusztai
In this paper, I will explore the practices of radical psy movements in the UK in the 1970s. Our starting point is the slogan from that era: ‘the personal is political’. This phrase reflects how the power of collectives can ‘open up’ spaces for the public, a quality that differs from traditional psychoanalytic practices. Feminist and liberatory social movements of the time critiqued psychoanalysis and developed new DIY psy practices that addressed how power is maintained through capitalism and political oppression. Freud’s theory—even when it attempts to transcend common sense and the lived experience of love, sex, thoughts, and feelings—is still conceived within ‘capitalist social relations’ and therefore reproduces the characteristics of capitalist reality. Horizontal versions of psychoanalytic praxis challenged this relationality and were often initiated by autonomous grassroots groups and feminist mental health activism. At the same time, such initiatives have frequently been dismissed as inadequate forms of mental health support and not considered legitimate expressions of psychoanalysis. This alternative history of DIY psychoanalysis attempts to put the unconscious into practice and to apply this as both an experimental and political exercise. This history follows the trajectory of consciousness-raising, self-analysis, unconsciousness-raising, and feminist psychoanalytic praxis. DIY methods and self-help in this framework imply mutuality and a horizontal relationship based on the exchange of skills, knowledge, and resources, rather than hierarchy. This paper draws on both hope and despair from a historical perspective, examining examples of activism, psychoanalysis, and mutual care as collective practices of life.
Psychoanalysis, Mutuality and Society in Early Therapeutic Communities
Ana Tomčić
This presentation will delve into the early history of free psychoanalytic clinics – particularly the approach called Planned Environment Therapy – in order to investigate the ways in which analysts working in these residential communities addressed the intersection of emotional and material deprivation. We will be looking at how members of early therapeutic communities theorised the psychological effects of communal life on children, young people and adults who experienced inadequate care, poverty and various forms of violence. Analysts, social workers and educators such as Marjorie Franklin, David Wills and Arthur Barron shared the belief that a key healing factor was enabling members to build stable communal relationships, leading to both internal and relational shifts. For a person who does not possess a stable and safe internal framework, they argued, it is the sense of communal belonging, mutuality and relational stability that holds the key to psychological recovery. Within the communities themselves, this would entail challenging the hierarchical divisions between members and staff, analysts and patients, but also educational and spatial divisions. In addition to this, they stressed the value of work and communal meetings as avenues not only for self-expression, but also for the expression of anger, protest and the desire for transformation. Finally, we will look at the social model that arose from the first psychoanalytically informed therapeutic communities in the UK, drawing parallels with those established later in other countries and contexts.
Discontent and Collectivity: Free Psychoanalytic Clinics as Spaces of Sanitary Emancipation
Ana Minozzo
This paper examines Brazil’s free psychoanalytic clinics as radical experiments in sanitary emancipation that reshape mental healthcare. It argues these clinics provide crucial resources for rethinking health from medical humanities and decolonial perspectives. Based on ethnographic research with clinical collectives in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond, the analysis explores how these grassroots initiatives—emerging from a discipline marked by elitist and patriarchal traces—mobilize what Moten and Harney (2021) term a ‘corruptive’ form of emancipation. Through practices of territorial listening, the clinics reimagine care in ways that directly challenge the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being embedded in global mental health paradigms. Situated within Brazil’s post-Psychiatric Reform landscape, clinics like Coletivo Pontes da Psicanálise—with its ‘escuta de gira’ Afro-Brazilian approach—and Margens Clínicas—working in territories affected by racialized state violence—confront the DSM-driven diagnostic logic as a ‘neo-colonising discourse’ under financial capitalism. Their work critically fulfils the promise of the medical humanities by, first, politicizing care as a commons rather than a commodified service; second, fostering situated epistemologies grounded in relational and territorial forms of alienation; and third, resisting depoliticised metrics of WHO-style Functional Epidemiology. These ‘unfinished’ experiments in street psychoanalysis and anti-racist care ethics reveal both the radical potential and the inevitable capitalist contaminations of collective health work under coloniality. Ultimately, they offer a compelling model for rethinking mental health through insurgent, place-based, and decolonial frameworks.
Part 2: 2pm – 3:30pm
Fog: In Conversation with Artist Ana Čvorović, between Art and Psychoanalysis
With the participation of the FREEPSY Collective & Sound Artist Matthew Faulkner
Our conversation unfolds between art and psychoanalysis. It showcases the sculpture work of Ana Čvorović, in particular her exhibition Fog, and offers insights into a collective process where art and psychoanalysis are in dialogue. Through Fog, we meet a world of fragments, an intricate play on walls, transparency, opacity, inside and outside, the positions of doctor and patient, but also fragility and psychic suffering. Ana’s work constructs porous or re-imagined clinical rooms, as well as fantastical towers that exist in tension between instability and robustness. Ultimately, it is an attempt to critically question society’s gaze upon madness. In this presentation, we invite you to step into this world, and to also experience the creative process of researchers of the FREEPSY collective, who engage Ana and her work. We offer a composition of text, sound, and images that traces the ways in which the unconscious is at the heart of how we think and create in our multidisciplinary team. The productivity of the unconscious is part of our method.
On this occasion, we will also launch the art book Fog, which extends beyond the documentation of an art exhibition, and captures the nature of transdisciplinary experimentation by the FREEPSY collective.
This presentation will include a collective exercise of deep listening of sound art pieces by Matthew Faulkner, who in his work engages Ana Čvorović and the FREEPSY collective.
Note:
Our project is funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Grant (ERC Consolidator Grant guarantee), project title: ‘FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times’ (PI Raluca Soreanu).
