Ana Tomcic

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.

In current histories of psychoanalysis, Melitta Schmideberg still lives under the shadow of her mother, Melanie Klein. If Schmideberg’s name is mentioned at all, it is in the context of the so-called Controversial Discussions that took place at the British Psychoanalytical Society in the early 1940s. During these discussions and in the preceding years, Schmideberg accused her mother and her supporters of dominating the British Psychoanalytical Society and trying to exclude any analysts who held opposing views. Even today, these criticisms are not given due consideration. In historical articles published in psychoanalytic journals, Schmideberg’s attacks on her mother are described as “vicious”, “spectacular” and references are made to her “illness” as a way of discrediting her ideas. In terms of psychoanalytic contributions, Schmideberg’s decades-long work with juvenile and adult offenders is barely mentioned at all. The similarities between her early work and that of her mother are stressed, and their later differences are dismissed as the result of Schmideberg’s excessive desire to gain independence from her mother. The first serious studies of Schmideberg’s work were undertaken by Gabriele Cassullo (2006) and Michal Shapira (2013/2017). However, there is still a lot of research to be done, especially when it comes to the original theoretical contributions of Schmideberg’s work with offenders. And this is what I will briefly attempt to do here by focusing on Schmideberg’s ideas on the role of class in mental health and the function of the super-ego in anti-social behaviour.

The Hawkspur Camp was a joint initiative started by David Wills and Marjorie Franklin. Willis was a Quaker educator with an interest in psychoanalysis, whereas Franklin was an established analyst and one of the founders of the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, the first institution in the UK to work with offenders on psychoanalytic principles. In 1936, they founded a camp for young men (age 16-25) who, due to the lack of affection and approval in their early environment, showed signs of social maladjustment. The cases were largely referred from the Institute, but some young men also came on their own. What started with a 1000 £, a colony of tents and a piece of land ended up as a supportive community with an elaborate social structure. With the help of the supervisors, the camp members were gradually supposed to devise their own terms of social functioning, build their lodging and grow their own food. It was believed that the principle of shared responsibility would have a restorative effect on the members’ feeling of usefulness and self-worth. The working principle of the camp was based on a combination of psychoanalytic ideas and planned environment therapy. Though the camps’ supervisors drew on the knowledge of previous initiatives, such as August Aichhorn’s famous residential school for young offenders in Vienna, it could be said that the Hawkspur camp laid the foundations of psychoanalytic group therapy as well as the therapeutic use of the environment in working with maladjusted young people. This paper will examine the camp’s social functioning, the role of psychoanalysis in its organisation and everyday life as well as its influence on later educational and therapeutic communities in the 1960s and the 1970s.