This work aims to explore the history of the Argentine Platform Group, which developed as a split from the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association) in the late 1960s, and how this group understood the relationship between social and clinical transformation in a context of imperialist violence and dictatorships.
As stated in their letter of rupture, the IPA had become a hierarchical institution that placed psychoanalysis at the service of the ideology of the dominant classes. Among their criticisms were the lack of internal democracy, exploitation of the unpaid work of young psychoanalysts, and the non-acceptance of psychoanalysts without medical training. Later, they would form the Coordinadora de Trabajadores de Salud Mental and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia, precursors to the Argentine Anti-Asylum Reform.
The creation of the Argentine Platform Group took place during a time of dictatorship and was heavily influenced by the Argentine Cordobazo and the student uprisings of May 1968 in Europe. Later, with the establishment of the Military Dictatorship, its members began to be persecuted for their relationship with marxism. In their letter of rupture with the IPA, they affirm their commitment to a psychoanalysis in service of the popular majorities and to socialism.
Their clinical practice was varied, but in constant reflection on how to make psychoanalysis accessible to the working class, both in the financial sense and in relation to clinical forms and the conflicts that could arise. Some of its members focused on group psychoanalysis and community psychoanalysis. They had important reflections on how the violence so present in everyday life in Latin America was repressed and returned in the transference. The Plataforma Group also made fundamental contributions to the critique of the hierarchy between different mental health professionals in hospitals, shifting the primacy of the psychiatrist over other workers and users.
Certain imaginaries have taken hold around the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) as a rupture that dismantled the psychoanalytic work carried out at the Policlínico de Lanús, a public hospital south of Buenos Aires whose psychopathology service, directed by Mauricio Goldenberg from 1956-1972, achieved such prestige in the training of psychoanalysts that it acquired an almost mythical status, known simply as “El Lanús”. Carlos Tewel, in his book El Lanús, la generación del ’80, has challenged this narrative, asserting that the service continued to function and train professionals during and after the dictatorship years. Taking this as a starting point, this paper offers an exploratory examination of the psychoanalytic practices at El Lanús before, during, and after the military regime, asking what these practices became in each period, rather than assuming their simple survival or dissolution.
El Lanús also invites a more precise account of what “free” meant in this history. It was not Argentina’s only, nor its first, hospital-based psychoanalytic practice: psychoanalysis had already entered public hospitals in the 1930s, within an already gratuitous health system. What distinguished El Lanús was scale and systematization: it became the first service to institutionalize psychoanalysis as the organizing framework for clinical training within a general hospital, reaching a depth of saturation with few parallels elsewhere, comparable perhaps only to the Tavistock Clinic in Britain or La Borde in France, though neither achieved the same national centrality.
Drawing on institutional archives, interviews, and published testimonies of the service, the paper reconstructs a preliminary historical model of El Lanús’s psychoanalytic practice and attention across the three periods. Rather than presuming continuity or rupture, it argues that a case-specific account of what was lost, adapted, and reinvented offers a more precise picture of the dictatorship’s effects on this particular free clinical practice than the dissolution narrative allows.
This paper reconstructs a neglected genealogy of psychoanalysis as a public good in Italy, arguing that the Italian experience constitutes a distinct tradition of socially engaged psychoanalytic practice. Despite its originality, this tradition has remained largely absent from both psychoanalytic historiography and contemporary debates on free psychoanalytic clinics.
Italian initiatives emerged at the intersection of the political and cultural transformations of the so-called “68 period”, the workers’ movement, Basaglia’s critique of psychiatry, and broader efforts to democratize mental health and knowledge production.
The paper examines three pivotal moments in this genealogy. It begins with Enzo Morpurgo’s Consultorio Popolare di Niguarda, which brought psychoanalytic listening into a working-class neighbourhood, challenging its identification with private bourgeois practice. It then considers Paolo Perrotti’s Laboratori of Lo Spazio Psicoanalitico, territorially embedded psychoanalytic services offering affordable treatment in dialogue with local communities. Finally, it explores the contributions of Pier Francesco Galli and Elvio Fachinelli, whose institutional, educational, and cultural experiments expanded psychoanalysis beyond the consulting room into schools, social movements, and the public sphere. In subsequent decades, new psychoanalytic clinics and collective initiatives emerged across Italy. Today, some provide free treatment in urban peripheries, while others have developed forms of care specifically for migrants and other marginalized populations.
The Italian tradition should therefore be understood not as a peripheral chapter but as an alternative paradigm of psychoanalytic institution-building. Rather than simply providing free treatment, these initiatives experimented with new infrastructures of listening, reimagining psychoanalysis as a democratic practice, a common good, and a form of public care. Building on this forgotten tradition, the paper concludes by proposing the model of the psychoanalytic civic university: an extra muros university that engages in situated listening with its territory, collaborates with psychoanalytic collectives, and returns knowledge to society through research, teaching, advocacy, and collective processes of healing and social change.
This paper presents the results of the research that gave rise to the book From the Origins of Psychoanalysis: Memory and the Formation of a Social and Political Bond of Clinical Practice, published in 2026 and developed through an investigation conducted at the archives and library of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. The volume inaugurates the first cycle of Portuguese translations of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society protocols, bringing together historical research, translation, curatorial work, and critical readings of documents produced during the formative years of psychoanalysis.
The study is centred on five protocols selected from the records of meetings held at Berggasse 19: On the Psychology of Marxism (Zur Psychologie des Marxismus), Epistemology and Psychoanalysis (Erkenntnistheorie und Psychoanalyse), On the Foundations of Maternal Love (Zur Grundlage der Mutterliebe), On Death and Sexuality (Über Tod und Sexualität), and Debate on Onanism (VIII. Onanie-Debatte). Taken together, these texts make it possible to map the questions that traversed psychoanalysis in its formative period: politics, social inequality, epistemology, sexuality, motherhood, the body, collectivity, and suffering. These debates accompany a psychoanalysis in the process of becoming, collectively elaborated in dialogue with the cultural and political transformations of Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The curatorial proposal places these protocols in dialogue with works of the Vienna Secession, particularly those of Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Richard Gerstl. This encounter situates psychoanalysis within a shared cultural landscape, highlighting how artists and psychoanalysts engaged with common concerns regarding childhood, eroticism, memory, urban life, and the social transformations of modernity.
It is argued that these records allow us to revisit the origins of psychoanalysis as a collective experience of elaboration, in which theory, clinical practice, and social life remained deeply interconnected. The translation and curatorship of these materials contribute to contemporary debates on memory, transmission, and the historiography of psychoanalysis, offering new perspectives for understanding the relationships between history, culture, and social responsibility. At the same time, they render visible documents, figures, and debates that have often been marginalised by more established institutional narratives, making it possible to revisit the history of psychoanalysis through its collective processes of elaboration, its dialogues with culture, and the social and political conditions that shaped its formation.
Esta comunicação apresenta os resultados da pesquisa que deu origem ao livro Das origens da psicanálise: memória e formação de um laço social e político da clínica, publicado em 2026 e desenvolvido a partir de investigação realizada junto aos arquivos e à biblioteca do Sigmund Freud Museum, em Viena. A obra inaugura o primeiro ciclo de traduções para o português de protocolos da Sociedade Psicanalítica de Viena, articulando pesquisa histórica, tradução, curadoria e leitura crítica de documentos produzidos nos momentos iniciais da constituição da psicanálise.
O trabalho toma como eixo cinco protocolos selecionados entre os registros das reuniões realizadas na Berggasse 19: Sobre a Psicologia do Marxismo (Zur Psychologie des Marxismus), Epistemologia e Psicanálise (Erkenntnistheorie und Psychoanalyse), Sobre os Fundamentos do Amor Materno (Zur Grundlage der Mutterliebe), Sobre a Morte e a Sexualidade (Über Tod und Sexualität) e Debate sobre o Onanismo (VIII. Onanie-Debatte). Reunidos, esses textos permitem construir uma cartografia das questões que atravessavam a psicanálise em sua formação: política, desigualdade social, epistemologia, sexualidade, maternidade, corpo, coletividade e sofrimento. Esses debates acompanham uma psicanálise em processo de constituição, elaborada coletivamente em diálogo com as transformações culturais e políticas da Viena do início do século XX.
A proposta curatorial coloca esses protocolos em diálogo com obras da Secessão Vienense, especialmente de Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka e Richard Gerstl. Esse encontro permite situar a psicanálise no interior de uma mesma paisagem cultural, evidenciando como artistas e psicanalistas compartilhavam inquietações relativas à infância, ao erotismo, à memória, à vida urbana e às transformações sociais da modernidade.
Argumenta-se que esses registros permitem revisitar as origens da psicanálise como uma experiência coletiva de elaboração, na qual teoria, clínica e mundo social permaneciam profundamente articulados. A tradução e a curadoria desses materiais contribuem para os debates contemporâneos sobre memória, transmissão e historiografia da psicanálise, oferecendo novas perspectivas para compreender as relações entre história, cultura e responsabilidade social. Ao mesmo tempo, tornam visíveis documentos, personagens e debates frequentemente secundarizados pelas narrativas institucionais mais consolidadas, permitindo revisitar a história da psicanálise a partir de seus processos coletivos de elaboração, de suas interlocuções com a cultura e das condições sociais e políticas que atravessaram sua constituição.
While American psychoanalytic institutions invoke “neutrality” as a safeguard, especially in moments of political crisis, in this paper I argue that this neutrality is itself a symptom: the residue of an unresolved collective mourning rooted in the traumatic ruptures of Nazification, exile, and forced assimilation. Once inseparable from the leftist European project of free clinics and liberatory social transformation, the field crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s and ’40s and retreated into a medicalized, depoliticized treatment model that I read as a collective failure to mourn. Drawing on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” and the work of Danto, Jacoby, and Kuriloff, I trace how this unmetabolized loss was infused into American psychoanalytic theory, institutional silence, and the very frameworks of selfhood, fragmentation, and healing through which the field thinks. Following Anne Anlin Cheng, I argue that grief unfelt becomes grievance: a wounded identification that converts loss into disavowal and aggression. I read the lives and work of Jewish émigré analysts such as Heinz Kohut—who, watching Freud’s train pull out of Vienna in 1938, recalled “the feeling of a crumbling universe”—as one central frame. I take up Kohut’s disidentification from his own Jewishness as evidence of a repudiation that became structural, one that surfaces today in the field’s defensive splitting over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Following Saketopoulou, Kassouf, and Butler, I propose a traumatophilic reorientation through which the field might metabolize its losses and reclaim the relational and liberatory vitality of its origins. I argue that the political struggles of the present, and in particular the struggle for a free Palestine, can help us to reorient psychoanalysis toward a more liberatory praxis. Facing a polycrisis uncannily resonant with 1938, American psychoanalysis must decide, once more, whether to mourn or to disavow.
In Brazil, psychoanalysis entered Brazilian public life largely through artists and aesthetic movements. The Modern Art Week of 1922 marked the country’s emergence into the artistic avant-garde. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade published The Anthropophagic Manifesto, calling on Brazilian artists to embrace the parricidal and cannibalistic gesture inspired by Freud’s Totem and Taboo as the basis for a national cultural affirmation. A few years later, Flávio de Carvalho drew on Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to create an aesthetic experiment now regarded as one of the first performance artworks in Brazil. Later published as a book, the action consisted of walking against the flow of a Corpus Christi procession in São Paulo, provoking a violent reaction from the crowd, which attempted to lynch him.
These episodes illustrate the decisive role played by the arts in introducing psychoanalysis into the Brazilian public sphere through deeply subversive practices. During the same period, psychiatry was largely dominated by eugenic and hygienist ideologies, and Freud’s work was frequently interpreted in ways that accommodated these moral frameworks.
Recovering this history is essential for understanding contemporary developments in Brazilian psychoanalysis. Its circulation through aesthetic practices has preserved the heretical force of psychoanalytic practice, understood as a creative engagement with language that disrupts representational logic. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic clinic is always a process of invention, capable of generating clinical dispositifs beyond the traditional analyst–analysand dyad, including therapeutic group interventions, workshops devoted to aesthetic production, and the “peripatetic clinic” proposed by Antonio Lancetti. These practices underpin the work of the Intervention Collective: Towards a Clinical-Political Psychoanalysis, a research laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
