Following the vibrant energy of our fourth meeting, the Free Clinics Working Group (FCWG) convened for its fifth iteration on Monday, 15th of September, in person at LiFt in London and online with colleagues peppered all around the globe. We were honoured to host a profound session of discussion and sharing in the presence of international collaborators and guests, centring on the travelling concept of ‘Territorial Listening’.
This workshop marked a significant moment for FREEPSY, as we were delighted to welcome the Brazilian Psychoanalyst Jorge Broide and members of his team, Marina Rogano, Beatriz Rezende Dias and Patricia Brandão de Lima at Rede SUR – a clinical project Jorge runs with his partner and collaborator Emilia Broide. Their presence allowed us to ground our theoretical explorations in the rich soil of lived practice and collective invention. Their case study and dispositif presentation was a highlight of the day.
Travelling Concepts: ‘Territorial Listening’
A central question for FREEPSY is: how did psychoanalysis travel from Europe to other locations, such as North America and Latin America? We regard psychoanalysis as a diasporic field of knowledge, formed through a series of dislocations, migrations and transnational forms of movement. We are interested in tracing the entanglements of psychoanalysis with other systems of thought, emancipatory movements and liberation struggles. We document the way psychoanalysis, in these new entanglements, has engaged inequalities based on race, gender, class, and poverty. Ultimately, we follow the contemporary metamorphoses of Freud’s couch, as it travelled to various non-European sites.
In this edition of the FCWG, we turned on its head the idea of psychoanalysis travelling from Europe to ‘the rest of the world’. In our ethnographic and historical research, free clinics in Latin America emerge as spaces of political experimentation, expanding the scope of what psychoanalysis has to offer to the mental health field and to collective life. The ideas, practices and methods established in the free clinics in Latin America have accelerated their travels across various geographical and professional locations. Challenging an image of a centre (Europe) and a periphery (the rest of the world), we aimed to explore a pluricentre arrangement of psychoanalytic ideas that matter.
Among these ideas that matter, ‘territorial listening’, coined by Brazilian psychoanalysts and thinkers Jorge and Emilia Broide, is gaining ever more importance for practitioners across the world. The concept powerfully points to the embodied nature of psychoanalytic listening and its intrinsic connection with the collective. In this workshop, we had the privilege to explore the genealogy of this idea with its authors, tracing its anchorage in the specific social and political context of Brazil, and understanding its organising force in clinical and community work. We also explored how the concept has travelled to sites beyond Brazil, and how it’s lately made a vital inscription on our theoretical, clinical and artistic imaginaries.
The session was a vibrant space of co-thinking, where the concept of ‘territorial listening’ was not just discussed but also practised through the collective dynamic of the group.
