Ana Minozzo

The acceleration of climate disaster as well as the rise of technofascism, genocidal colonialism and essentialist patriarchy in various corners of the world coincide with the social and relational turns in the field of psychoanalysis (Hannah Zeavin, 2025). Alert to modes of social and discursive reproduction as well as to efforts, in the microscale, that keep life liveable, feminisms, especially with decolonial and ecological inclinations, emerge as the paradigm from which our understanding of what living together entails can be re-discovered. In an effort to reorient psychoanalysis to the necessity of liveable lives, this presentation weaves matters of positionality, situatedness and responsibility – themes long-studied in feminist scholarship (Stacy Alaimo, 2017; Donna Haraway, 1988; Rosi Braidotti, 1994; Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2016; Yuderkis Espinosa Miñoso, 2020) – and the complex ethics of encounter. This tradition – neomaterialist, posthuman, poststructuralist, decolonial and black feminist –exits from the centrality of the symbolic, of language, of recognition, identification, as well as affective binarism and dialectics, as mediators of relationality. What is at stake when we come together? How else can we imagine togetherness? And what does that mean on the analytic couch?

I will hone into the discussion of the political ethics of care (Joan Tronto, 1993) and of difference in the posthuman (Rosi Braidotti, 2022) as the onto-epistemic pillars of what I am calling, in my current ongoing work, ‘the drive to care’, in which affect and the erotic/Eros are central to living, a liveable life, together. 

The climate catastrophe, current genocides and an overall necropolitical turn in various regions challenge us with an encounter with time. In the clinic we meet a reality of a crisis that is not in the past, rather, of a present-future-impossible. It is already happening; it is still happening; it will continue to happen and even; it is likely to get worst. 

Psychoanalysis has been guided by the past, from traumatic blueprints to a point de capiton, we are, seemingly, repeating and, the possible horizons for working through or even ‘healing’ entail being situated differently in relation to the past.  In this presentation, I draw on post-human feminist interventions on space and time, specifically, Rosi Braidotti’s work, to elaborate a psychosocial clinic of the ongoing catastrophe. Along ecofeminist thinkers, we will discuss possible modes of collectivity from the perspective of a creative drive to care.

No texto de apresentação de L’istituzione Negata, Franca Basaglia observa que, assim que as instituições são fechadas, é necessário pensar e criar alternativas. Desde o início dos esforços transnacionais antimanicomiais no século XX, o paradigma médico-científico do capitalismo financeiro tem ganhado mais espaço e, na última década, iniciativas como o campo da Global Mental Health têm difundido uma matriz hegemônica e colonizadora nas possibilidades de cuidado em saúde mental. A virada infraestrutural é um movimento nas ciências sociais e na filosofia queer e feminista que se ocupa do encontro cotidiano nas práticas emancipatórias (Lauren Berlant). Berlant (2022) escreve: 

“As instituições encerram e consolidam poder, recursos e interesses, e representam a sua legitimidade como algo sólido e duradouro, uma previsibilidade da qual depende o social. As instituições normalizam a reciprocidade. O que constitui a infraestrutura, em contraste, são os padrões, hábitos, normas e cenas de montagem [assemblage] e uso”. 

A partir desse paradigma, proponho uma ecologia de cuidado porosa (Nancy Tuana; Stacy Alaimo) e coletiva (Jean Oury) como práxis alternativa ao encerramento institucional e suas reverberações patriarcais e coloniais, com base na escala, na financeirização e na reprodução da universalização. Nesta conversa, apresentarei os princípios teóricos de uma perspectiva infraestrutural do cuidado, ilustrados por exemplos históricos e contemporâneos, como as clínicas livres de psicanálise do pós-guerra, o movimento de auto e co-análise da militância política britânica na década de 70 e, em especial,

This presentation invites colleagues into witnessing an extract of fieldwork being currently conducted in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, which dives into the vibrant and heterogeneous movement of free psychoanalytic clinics in the region. Combining decolonial and feminist approaches to ethnography and psychoanalysis, this piece departs from a positionality of situatedness (Haraway, 1988) which enables me, the researcher, to grasp reverberations of the psychic life of the territory and my relationship of stranger-entangled with it (Alaimo, 2017). In particular, the scene presented takes place at a clinical dispositif ran by local psychoanalysts in downtown São Paulo which aims at ‘listening to the street’ (Broide et al, 2022).

Challenging the universalising principles and functional epidemiological anchors of the field of Global Mental Health, this piece of ongoing Psychosocial research hopes to propose notions of porosity, commons and infrastructures to the field of mental health care in the context of (post)-coloniality and climate catastrophe (Soreanu and Minozzo, 2024). Listening ‘otherwise’, therefore, is presented as a political strategy of care which opens space for new arrangements of living together.

Among many of Anne Dufourmantelle’s conceptual figurations, three interventions may interest feminist psychoanalysts in particular: ‘Risk’; ‘Gentleness’ and ‘Hospitality’ (Dufourmantelle, 2019; 2021). Carved in dialogue with others and always with her singular touch, these concepts, as I will argue in this presentation, are foundational to an Ethics of Encounter. 

In catastrophic times of poly-crises, desire and relationality as imagined by phallogocentric philosophies come to a standstill, insisting on imaginative threads that halt future-possibles (Braidotti, 2022). Psychoanalytic discourse, canonical and contemporary, operate in this gap of possibility: in one hand, modulating subjectivity according to parameters of a world-in-ruins and, on the other, by offering space for the germination of lives-otherwise (Olufemi, 2021). Feminist scholarship of various traditions has proposed an Ethics of Care instead of assuming moral compasses based on competition, extraction, profit, etc. (Tronto, 1993; Gillingham, 1982). In psychoanalytic theory, the compass of desire and of the Real veer us away from utilitarian dystopias. Yet, without critical elaboration, relationality and togetherness are often still inscribed in Oedipal frames that reproduce and commit to Sameness (Braidotti, 2006). Thinking of the analytic encounter as a micro-laboratory for political possibilities, I make an alliance with Anne Dufourmantelle in imagining an Ethics of Encounter, one in which difference is elaborated in togetherness.

Attuned to feminist historical concepts from ‘symbolic gestation’, the ‘matrixial borderspace’ to ‘sympoiesis’, and to contemporary feminist theorists who stress the necessity of life-with-others, I propose that psychoanalytic listening itself must be understood as an erotic act of hospitality — a making-space where difference can touch without alienating-annihilation. In the encounter, difference produces words-worlds. In the ruins of familiar worlds, where psychoanalysis finds itself displaced too, it is perhaps in this minor, infra-ordinary practice of psychoanalytic listening that an ethics of future-becoming persists, as I will suggest in this presentation, making a gesture from the necessity of Care to that of Encounter as an ethical paradigm for our praxes.

Keywords: Ethics of Care, Risk, Hospitality

This presentation proposes the concept of ‘porosity’ to Global Mental Health, spotlighting Brazilian Psychoanalytic Free Clinics as a field of situatedness. It explores utopian dimensions of psy care, tracing cracks in established paradigms and examining psychoanalysis in particular sociocultural contexts of the Global South.

As it has been widely critiqued within the Humanities and Social Sciences, practices of psychological care have historically been intertwined with the foundations of a modern medical discourse, forging limiting possibilities for bodies, minds, subjectivity, relationality, and distinctions between normal and pathological thereafter.  In the context of ongoing psychosocial research, this presentation will delve into issues of suffering, psychopathology, and coloniality, exploring potential dialogues with Latin-American critical thought in public and collective health, critical epidemiology, and contemporary approaches to decolonizing and conceptualizing health systems. The focus will be on the vibrant phenomenon of psychoanalytic free clinics as spaces for sanitary emancipation and political creativity. This unusual connection between psychoanalysis, a late-19th century European discipline known for elitism and patriarchal influences, and autonomous collectives advocating for ‘territorial listening,’ reflects a transformative form of emancipation, or a ‘mental health commoning’. Together, we will challenge historical boundaries that confine psychoanalytic practice within a system of social reproduction that echoes its colonial, modern and patriarchal inheritances. Navigating from Freud’s ambivalence to ‘diluted’ psychoanalysis to productions of contemporary autonomous collectives, we uncover the utopic creativity in working beyond insular practice, engaging with the creation of ‘new worlds’ that characterises much of such collective action. Acknowledging psychoanalysis does not own the unconscious, I will explore political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of mental health when open to diverse sensibilities, as seen in recent and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Latin America.

Keywords

Global mental health, porosity, situatedness, territorial listening, free clinics

Feminist and psychosocial scholarship have made significant contributions to the critique of psychoanalytic political and epistemological pillars over several decades.  In this presentation I propose the concept of ‘co-poiesis’ to address a horizon of possibility within the risks and ethics of encountering others. In dialogue with feminist theory, ecology and peripheric psychoanalytic practitioners, such as Pierre Fédida and Anne Dufourmantelle, we will think of analytic transference and the politics of encounters in the contemporary psychosocially-informed clinic. Creativity, togetherness and the realm of possibility emerging from necessity are aspects we will consider when honing into anxiety and promises of security in contemporary discourse.

The mode of alienation experienced in the infinity of divisions that characterise what Deleuze (1992) astutely called ‘societies of control’ resonates in the complex field of mental health, where the rise of categories of diagnoses in the last four decades is met with an increased identification with such universalising codes. Whilst global mental health declines, Big Pharma and TikTok-content mediate narratives that compose a contemporary grammar of suffering.  The juxtaposition of these forms of modulation of experience, complicates subjective and political possibilities even further (Raunig, 2009). The concomitant ‘mold’ and ‘modulation’-like qualities of the current psy-discourses characterises an affective-politics that leaves little room for emancipation, escape, or creativity.

In such landscape, I propose a study of contemporary free psychoanalytic clinics, which have boomed internationally, and mainly in Latin America, as a site of collectivity where dividuals can not just speak…but entangle in nets of togetherness (Cusicanqui, 2023; Braidotti, 2019; Haraway, 2016).  In this presentation I draw on current psychosocial ethnographic fieldwork of autonomous free clinics in Brazil to stretch imaginative potentialities in the many forms of collectivity that cross current social, ecological and political troubles. We will elaborate further on dividuality as inscribed in a multi-layered grammar of suffering, which crosses systems of colonisation, exploitation, extraction and alienation, whilst considering the traces and excesses that overflow from molding and modulating control as the realm of the undercommons (Moten and Harney, 2013; Guattari, 2000). 

In ‘The Collective’ seminars, Jean Oury (2005) speaks at length about multidimensional and multirelational collectives and of psychic suffering stemming off an alienation from ‘the collective’. For Oury “the collective is a machine to treat alienation”, it is so as long as it respects the infinity of pluralities within it, germinating differences. Expanding this notion into what has been observed in fieldwork, we will think together about horizons of commons beyond abysses of dividuality in the context of free clinics and the fugitive potency in political alliances, as well as in symptomatic productions and creative spaces for their elaboration beyond pre-established codes and onto the poetics of the encounter (Federici, 2018; Ferreira da Silva, 2016).

This presentation will discuss the notion of ‘porosity of the drive’ (Perci Schiavon, 2019; dos Santos, 2023) in articulation with efforts of the realm of the ‘undercommmons’ (Moten and Harney, 2013) in the particular case of psychoanalytic free clinics. 

Drawing on a current multidisciplinary collective research, I will elaborate on the ethics of togetherness of several historical and contemporary sites and cases of psychoanalytic entanglement with territorial demands. What happens when psychoanalysis is 1-more and not it-all? In other words, what is at stake when psychoanalysis is entangled within a web of praxes of care rather than enclosed within epistemic borders, paranoid walls or even aesthetic alienation?

Since Freud (1912), a resistance to  ‘diluted’ forms of psychoanalysis in the name of an ‘undiluted’ practice has contentiously informed the frontiers of our field. Yet, it can be argued that our practice is marginal from the very start. From 1970s Italian feminist groups to anti-dictatorship Brazilian social clinics and contemporary autonomous groups in the UK and Latin America, vignettes and fieldwork moments will compose this presentation that aims at opening a conceptual debate over the creativity of working between necessity and possibility in the clinic. 

What do we miss or, worse, what do we reproduce if ignoring or defending against the knowledge that psychoanalysis does not own the unconscious (Guattari, 2009)? Equally, what is added politically, ethically and aesthetically to psychoanalysis when it is open to the production of sensibilities rather than se/parations? 

In recent years, a boom of autonomous free clinics has been blooming in South America. In Brazil and Argentina, but not only, several groups of mostly younger analysts started offering psychoanalytic sessions for free, on the street or in unorthodox community centres, addressing, at times, particular forms of suffering that relate to Patriarchal, Racist and Capitalist Estate violence in more general terms. What our current multidisciplinary research findings indicate is that such practices, whilst situated, connect to a web of historical endeavours that, despite marginal to the hegemonic historiography of the field, are anchored in efforts of dis-alienating mental health clinical practice (Rolnik, 2022; Robcis, 2021, Federici, 2018). 

In this presentation, we will look into such therapeutic collectives and their spatiotemporal webs from a Latin American Critical Epidemiological approach to Public and Collective Health, as well as drawing on ethical underpinnings derived from the field of Posthuman Feminism, with the view of situating these events of clinical praxis as a ‘therapeutics of commoning’ (Braidotti, 2022; Breilh, 2004). What do we mean by an ethics of togetherness and what are the particularities of psychoanalytic onto-epistemic pillars that give consistency to such free clinics are the questions we will examine, together. 

The political history of psychology is loaded with a brutal project of alienation that has been widely critiqued. Psychoanalysis, in particular, has zig-zagged from reproducing the pillars of such alienation to opening spaces for radical possibilities of thinking subjectivity and practicing togetherness. The latter, however, has been systematically obscured from the discipline’s official history. Our current research rescues the vibrant lives of past and present practices of de-individualising and commoning the clinic.

In this presentation, we will trace historical and contemporary maps of the movement of such free clinics in the field of psychoanalysis or ‘mental health’. Beginning with educational projects in Central and Western Europe (1920-1970), we will discuss how communities that were originally supposed to produce conforming young subjects eventually led to new affective economies and radical forms of psychoanalytic practice, even if they were not initially understood as such. Zooming into the contemporary Latin American clinics, especially in Brazil and Argentina, we find spaces that operate as a political strategy against the forces of estate violence, racial and gender-based oppression, leveraging witnessing and collectivity within a situated territory. 

Marginal, peripheric, open, border-clinics. This is the vocabulary of these autonomous emancipatory projects. They exist not only in a ‘free-from-money’ realm, but a ‘free-something-else’, so we ask: what else are these clinics freeing? As we reflect on such projects of reinvention of psychoanalysis, a potency of imagination and creativity unfolds, moving social symptoms into affective-bonds, common-ly unleashed.