Clínica Aberta de Psicanálise, Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil)
https://casadopovo.org.br/en/clinica-aberta-de-psicanalise-2/
The Open Clinic of Psychoanalysis [Clínica Aberta de Psicanálise], at Casa do Povo, São Paulo, is one of the forerunners of a broad movement that started in Brazil in 2014, and claimed public spaces for free, collective and social work by psychoanalysts. This ‘socialisation’ of psychoanalysis, and the clinical and theoretical discussion of its commodified foundations preceded the radical turn to the right in the country’s political life, which partially criminalized the institutional left. This turn to the right opposed all social life that carries out collective, common work with universal free access. Public psychoanalytic clinics, however, continued their work with full vitality, deriving their strength from their theoretical roots and their social truth, and the Clínica Aberta de Psicanálise was one of them.
The Open Clinic of Psychoanalysis carries out its work in the space of Casa do Povo, a cultural centre with a unique profile in itself, committed to revisiting and reinventing ideas on culture, community and memory, and to universal access. It is located in a central neighbourhood of São Paulo, a home to both middle class dwellers and the urban poor.
One of the most radical innovations of the collective, formulated by Tales Ab’Saber and colleagues, is the ‘analyst-group’, which is also a concrete answer to the challenges analysts encounter in turning to collective work. According to this dispositif, a patient can be seen by different analysts in the group, who come together around the cases in group supervision.
We cite below the words of one the patients — or users, or citizens — uttered during the analytical work carried out at the Clínica Aberta de Psicanálise at Casa do Povo:
‘I’ve come here because I’ve been told that this is a place where you can start your life over again…’
The work of this collective explores complex and rich modalities of transference, or transferences, on many levels — vertical, group, collective, personal, institutional or with the dispositif itself, or the collective setting — all captured by the idea of ‘group-analyst’, as the collective came to name these explorations.
Tales Ab’Saber was the keynote speaker of the second conference on free clinics, held at the Freud Museum in July 2021. His talk, ‘The Open Clinic and the Group-Analyst: Their Transferences and the Common’, will be published in a special issue dedicated to free clinics. Tales and his collective will be visiting the FREEPSY team in 2024.
