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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  

Legacies of the Free Clinics

Archiving the Free Clinic: An Archive for the Present 

Photo by Daniel Guimaraes

WHAT WE ARE UP TO

Nature and Its Discontents: Call for Papers

Organised by the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy; abstracts submission deadline is 7th February 25-27 of June 2025, University of Essex, UK. SIPP/ISSP 2025 Conference What drives us? Or where are we being driven towards? In times of climate catastrophe, emboldened fascism and genocides, the psychoanalytic subject comes under scrutiny as we examine its …

Psychoanalysis & Radical Psychiatry, FREEPSY Conference 2024

report by Harriet Mossop, PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. What does psychoanalysis say to radical psychiatry and vice versa? This question permeated the second major conference of the UKRI-funded FREEPSY project, which studies free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics around the world. The …

Exhibition ‘Fog’ Saturday 16 & Sunday 17, November 2024

A solo presentation by Ana Čvorović curated by Sacha Craddock, Wellcome Collection. Commentary by Sacha Craddock: Čvorović’s sculpture releases the power of association in the way it manages to play with suggestions of comfort as well as discomfort. By using a strange, distorted hint at precarity, the artist manages to construct, and combine, an inevitable mixture …