The Freud Museum is delighted to host the book launch of Raluca Soreanu’s monograph ‘The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis’ (Routledge, 2026, The Relational Perspectives Series).
This evening symposium dedicated to the book (6:00pm – 8:00pm) is available either in person or online.
The Psychic Life of Fragments rethinks trauma and psychic fragmentation starting from the psychoanalytic clinic.
What does it mean to work with fragments in psychoanalysis? What is the psychic life of fragments? And what can a fragment do? Raluca Soreanu writes about trauma, fragmentation and the radical plasticity of the psyche. Reconstructing Sándor Ferenczi’s trauma theory, she articulates an original vocabulary of fractures, splits, atomisations, pulverisations, leakages, detritus and psychic dematerialisation along with new formations, protective membranes, expansions, contagions and growths. She approaches the scene of trauma from new angles, paying attention to oblique lines and asymmetric encounters. Mobilizing clinical and literary vignettes, this book further argues for a minor psychoanalysis, one that emerges at the intersection of four types of theoretical-clinical experimentation: a psychoanalysis of scars, a psychoanalysis of organs, an eventful psychoanalysis and a blue psychoanalysis.
This book is important for clinicians and trainees in psychoanalysis, for mental health practitioners working with trauma, and for psychosocial and psychoanalytic thinkers. It is written to be used, between the psychoanalytic chair and the couch, especially at challenging times, in the transference and in the world.
Please click here if you would like to purchase an online ticket.
About the book:
‘Raluca Soreanu has become an indispensable thinker in contemporary psychoanalysis. With dazzling precision, she shows that the psyche’s fragments are not detritus but lively actors in trauma, memory, and repair. This book outlines a ‘minor psychoanalysis’ of scars, organs, catastrophe—an audacious re-staging of Ferenczi that re-opens psychoanalysis to its most experimental, timely, and unruly possibilities.’
Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis
‘Soreanu’s return to Ferenczi, like Lacan’s return to Freud, levers us not into the past but a transformational future, a new psychoanalytic imaginary that is oblique, tentacular, visceral, surreal, decolonial. Here is a vocabulary of pliable elements, mimicry, asynchronous temporalities, fluid bodies, mosaics of dead and alive fragments – a psyche sensorially gripped and dismembered by the scars of time, but endowed with radically creative capacities and modes of registration and survival. Compelling, poetic, and precise, anchored throughout in luminous clinical narratives and a rigorous didactic concern with process, this is an epoch-making contribution to the emergent Ferenczian tradition: rerouting the mainstream into fascinating, life-preserving waters.’
Matt Ffytche, Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex and Editor, Psychoanalysis and History
‘In her strikingly lyrical text, Raluca Soreanu elucidates what ‘being in fragments’ might mean psychically. Drawing on the work of Sándor Ferenczi, Soreanu takes us beyond the static and repetitive temporalities of dissociation and splitting, and suggests that rather than the discarded elements of trauma, psychic fragments have a life of their own. Through clinical vignettes she shows us how patient and analyst can create a montage of such fragments, producing transformations in suffering through the co-creation of new and surprising forms of psychic life. Breathtakingly original, Soreanu offers us an entirely new thesis on trauma.’
Lisa Baraitser, Psychoanalyst, The British Psychoanalytical Society, and Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
On the evening:
During the symposium, introduced and moderated by Lizaveta van Munsteren, we will hear from the author, Raluca Soreanu, and from guest speakers G Lori Millon, Patricia Gherovici, Matt ffytche, Lisa Baraitser, Jakob Staberg, Laura Salisbury & Julianna Pusztai.
The Psychic Life of Fragments is part of the Relational Perspectives book series at Routledge, edited by Adrienne Harris, Eyal Rozmarin & Steven Kuchuck.
The evening symposium will be followed by a wine and canapés reception.
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Speakers:
Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinker and writer. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and the co-author, with Jenny Willner and Jakob Staberg of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). Her new book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis was published by Routledge in April 2026 in the Relational Perspectives Series. She is the project lead of the FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant), an interdisciplinary collective of ten researchers studying the histories and legacies of free psychoanalytic clinics around the world. She is Academic Associate of The Freud Museum London; and Editor of the Studies in the Psychosocial series at Palgrave and of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis Series at 1968 Press.
G Lori Millon is a psychoanalyst working in private practice in Bristol. They hold a professional doctorate in Counselling Psychology and they teach and sit on the Training Committee for the Society for Social and Critical Psychoanalysis. In 2018 G received the Rozsika Parker Prize for their writings on non-binary genders, and they recently completed the manuscript for a collection of psychoanalytic auto-theory essays entitled ‘Dreaming in Tongues’. G organises Heterotopia Bristol, a space for radical psychoanalysis that includes events, reading groups and a social dreaming rhizome.
Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is the recipient of the Mary Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender-variant communities, and serves as a trustee of Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics in New York. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award; Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender, Transgender Psychoanalysis, and Bodies to Wear. She co-authored with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award; American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize). She has also co-edited with Manya Steinkoler, Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy; Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award); and most recently, The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender.
Matt ffytche is Professor at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, and his publications include The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (2011). He is editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History, and an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Lisa Baraitser is a psychoanalyst in practice in London (Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society) and Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the School of Social Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is at the intersection between social theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and sexuality studies, and concerns the temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. She has written widely on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, motherhood, care and time. Her books include Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009, joint-winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Book Prize); Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017), the co-authored book, Waiting Times: Crisis, Chronicity and Care (Bloomsbury, 2026), and a forthcoming co-edited volume on Violence and the Feminine: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives which will be published by Routledge, co-edited with Emanuela Quagliata. From 2017-2023 Lisa was co-Principal Investigator of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust collaborative award leading a team of researchers to investigate the meanings of waiting in, and for healthcare. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award titled Contragestive Time: Pregnant Uncertainties in Fertility Control.
Jakob Staberg is a practicing psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, and member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is an assistant professor for Comparative Literature and lecturer in aesthetics at Södertörn, University South of Stockholm. Staberg is working in the field of aesthetics, literature and psychoanalytic theory. Staberg has devoted himself to the relationship between Freud and Ferenczi from the perspective of the problem of transference and as it is expressed in dream interpretation, he has published on this topic together with Raluca Soreanu and Jenny Willner, Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe, Leuven University Press 2022. He has contributed in the anthology Towards the Limits of Freudian Thinking, Leuven University Press 2024 (ed Herman Westerink, Jenny Willner and Philippe van Haute). His forthcoming book, also published by Leuven University Press, is titled Aesthetics of Dreams: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Modernity.
Laura Salisbury is Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. Her work seeks to understand the relationship between time, care, and modes of narration. Laura has published widely on literary modernism, particularly the work of Samuel Beckett, and she is co-author of a new book about to be published by Bloomsbury: Waiting Times: Crisis, Chronicity and Care.
Julianna Pusztai is a London-based psychodynamic psychotherapist and psychosocial researcher, originally from Hungary. She has worked on several community projects, low-cost and free clinics, and is currently based at the Donald Winnicott Centre, East London NHS Foundation Trust. She is the co-founder of the Sándor Ferenczi Collective and a PhD candidate researching grassroots psychoanalytic collectives and DIY practices at Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times [FREEPSY], University of Essex.
Lizaveta van Munsteren is a psychodynamic psychotherapist (BPC) and academic with a research focus in psychoanalytic theory and history. She is a lecturer in psychotherapy at King’s College London, and teaches Freud at the Bowlby Centre. She is also a postdoctoral researcher with the FREEPSY project at the University of Essex, UK, working on theoretical formulations of the psychoanalytic frame in free clinics, and archives of free clinics in Vienna and Budapest. Her book The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930-1980 was published with Routledge and Open Access in 2025.
