We are thrilled to announce that the FreePsy Project will be participating in the upcoming La Conference 2025, organised by the Corpo Freudiano Vancouver. This significant event, titled ‘Feminine Desire: Honouring the Life and Work of Anne Dufourmantelle and Mari Ruti’, will take place from October 17-18, 2025, in the vibrant city of Vancouver, BC, in Canada.
This year’s conference will explore and honour the work of two remarkable and prolific psychoanalytic thinkers who left us too early: Anne Dufourmantelle (1964 – 2017) and Mari Ruti (1964 – 2023). Dufourmantelle and Ruti marked our zeitgeist with intellectual and emotional rigor, courageously posing questions that over-spilled the rigid, phallic order. Their powerful legacies in thinking through risk, femininity, and the force of feminine desire provide a crucial foundation for the conference’s theme.
In an era marked by intersecting crises—ecological, social, and political—the question of what psychoanalysis has to offer, and how its practice must evolve, has never been more urgent. La Conference 2025 promises to be a vital space for international dialogue on these very questions, continuing the brave intellectual traditions of its honourees.
You can find the full conference programme and list of speakers on the official website here: La Conference 2025 Programme (https://corpofreudianovancouver.com/2025/09/30/la-conference-2025-registration/)
We are particularly excited that our own Dr. Ana Minozzo, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the FREEPSY project, will be presenting her paper as part of the conference proceedings. Ana’s presentation is titled ‘Risk, Gentleness and Hospitality: Toward a Feminist Ethics of Encounter in Catastrophic Times’. In this paper, she will explore the delicate interplay between risk and care, arguing for a psychoanalytically-informed ethics that can hold space for the Other in a world often structured by defensiveness and violence.
Drawing on her current ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, she thinks through the concept of feminist desire not as a lack, but as a productive force that can reconfigure social bonds. Her work investigates how, within grassroots political movements and clinical practices, new forms of relationality are being forged. These are practices that do not shy away from the fundamental risks of opening oneself to the unknown of the Other, but which approach that risk with a radical gentleness and a stance of hospitality.
What might psychoanalysis learn from these feminist and community-based practices? How can the clinical encounter itself be reimagined as a site of political and ethical experimentation, especially when working with populations deeply affected by social and economic catastrophe? Continuing the work of FREEPSY, this contribution proposes that an ethics grounded in these principles is not a secondary concern but is central to the very possibility of a transformative psychoanalytic practice today.
Join Us There
La Conference 2025 brings together an incredible array of thinkers, clinicians, and scholars from around the world. It is a unique opportunity to engage in deep, meaningful conversation about the future of psychoanalysis and its role in our collective world.
A quick but important update: The organisers have recently announced that the conference will be a hybrid event. This is wonderful news, as it means you can join the conversation either in person in Vancouver or participate online from anywhere in the world. You can see their announcement here on Instagram. (https://www.instagram.com/p/DOWRdAgESrj/)
Registration for both in-person and online participation is now open. To secure your place and for all further information, please visit the official registration page: (https://corpofreudianovancouver.com/2025/09/30/la-conference-2025-registration/)
We look forward to connecting with you there, whether in person or virtually, ready to listen, debate, and think together about the ends—and the new beginnings—of analysis in our catastrophic, yet still hopeful, times.
FreePsy Team
