Ana Minozzo

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.