Julianna Pusztai

The paper will discuss the practices of radical psychoanalytic movements in the 1970s UK, exploring the significance of solidarity in their functioning. Our starting point is the 70s slogan; ‘the personal is political’. It reflects on how the power of collectives can ‘open up’ spaces for the public, which differs from spatial psychoanalytic sceneries. In the past, radical movements critiqued traditional psychoanalysis and implemented new practices that addressed how power is maintained through political oppression. These psychoanalytic movements provide a unique terrain for exploring how solidarity takes shape among various authoritative structures. I propose that this involves modes of psychoanalytic elasticity that come into play within these environments, recognising that the elastic frame is a fundamental aspect of democratic clinical practice and solidarity cultivation. We will encounter historical material on self-psychoanalytic movements that took psychoanalysis out of its middle- and upper-class private practice locations. In so to speak, radical self-psychoanalytic movements were an attempt to take psychoanalysis out into the wild. These movements, often with translucent walls, are situated at the margins of conventional practices. 

The text highlights the transformative potential of reworking psychoanalysis by challenging dominant theories and examining societal inequalities related to gender, sex, class, and race. The purpose is to maintain social harmony while also accepting the tension that arises from conflicting identities, much like the psychoanalytic process of allowing multiple self-states to coexist without opposing each other. I ask if sharing and offering psychoanalysis as accessible knowledge transforms into a symbol of communal support and unity. What psychic processes allow us to establish a sense of mutual recognition and shared practices through solidarity? The inquiry leads us to the core of these free clinics, where ideas of democracy have the potential to contribute to psychoanalytic activist movements in the search for solidarity.

Keywords: radical psychoanalysis, self-psychoanalysis, elasticity, solidarity, subjectivity

Psychoanalysis as a Renewable Organ: Can Solidarity Act as a Formative Force? 

In this presentation, I engage with a bio-perspective of psychoanalysis, framing it as an institutional organ. As with every institution, this also consists of a vibrant environment, asserting in dynamic social and psychic strata in the landscape of psychoanalysing as an organ function. Similar to any complex institutional environment, it raises the question of how it can undergo renewal amidst diverse layers of authority and power structures within and beyond clinical settings.

Taking inspiration from the Ferenczian approach, I delve into the historical and contemporary aspects of psychoanalysis, focusing on the rise of radical practices in response to escalating political tensions, climate challenges, and global crises. As part of the FREEPSY multidisciplinary research collective, I draw on the evolution of free psychoanalytic clinics in the UK, emphasising their political underpinnings and their role in challenging the social oppression that may be inherent in traditional clinical settings. 

Discussing the shift in free clinics through the lens of ‘autoplastic adaptation,’ as proposed by Ferenczi in 1926, I explore the possibility of psychoanalytic new organs. This proposition sheds light on the changing landscape of psychoanalytic practices, prompting a critical examination of the discipline. Can free clinics operate differently within the psychoanalytic institution? Is there space for such a transformation, and how do alternative clinics contribute to the potential ‘neoformation’ of different clinical ecologies in these spaces?

We intend to question what a healing environment looks like in psychoanalysis and what we call a healing environment as part of the capitalistic structure. Can two chairs in an empty room constitute a healing environment? Do we need a room? Is the healing environment outside or inside, or in between? We aim not to find a solution or create a new functional clinical space but to expand, provoke and feature what is already there. There are four steps in this journey. 
 
1.
As a prolonged exchange between artist and psychotherapist, our interest draws on psychoanalytic spaces dedicated to marginalised collectives. These psychoanalytic clinics are filled with life, communities, shared connections, and histories but often forgotten, hidden, or tucked away. Our collaboration was born at the scene of free clinics, where the sharp divider between private and public evaporates and where different types of mental health commons exist. We centre our attention on these environments, situated at London’s low-cost clinics. 
 
2. 
We aim to stretch this landscape and engage with the tradition of psychoanalytic free clinics from Freud’s time to the current public health care system. We demonstrate the notion between private and political, highlighting a psychic and physical elasticity that takes place within these clinical rooms. In the current state of social vulnerability, these clinical rooms are dynamic environments in which the space is constantly modified and challenged. These spaces are primarily used as multipurpose rooms in communities situated on the threshold of private and public. Accent the internal and external merge point, where walls are often flexible and even translucent for different types of realities. 
 
3.
This presentation marks the beginning of our alliance as part of a larger research project, Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times. As an act of solidarity with free clinics, we work towards a sculptural installation, a workshop, and a written piece. As a collaborative notion to embody free clinics, we imagine a different economy of care: a weightless space with elastic walls and soft lights, where the psychic can wander and free associate. This transportable room temporarily imagines a new, speculative clinical space in the public realm. This momentarily out-of-the-ordinary experience welcomes anyone to constitute new private and public experiences.  
 
4. 
The installations are an exploration of the psychodynamics of place, specifically in the context of war, migration, socio-economic impoverishment and processes of globalisation. Taking both personal and historical events as a point of departure, the work repurposes domestic everyday items imbued with notions of childhood, memory, and the unconscious. This practice is now expanded to reflect on the particular context of free psychoanalytical clinics – how do objects and sculptural assemblages generate alternative economies? What social and psychological effects can emerge in the production of creative environments for public and private interaction? These are some of the questions we aim to explore through this interdisciplinary collaboration. 

This presentation examines psychoanalysis as a social mission for the repressed parts of society. Social thinking and psychoanalysis are still the construction of academics who are already privileged. I propose to rethink this method addressing the endemic of whiteness and unaffordability that echoes its elitism. For this, I encounter present and past; the emerging radical practices as an unconscious reply to the currently rising aggressive political atmospheres, climate, and living crisis across the globe, in parallel with Ferenczi’s time where political aspects integrated to psychic defence and the social is separated from the individual’s suffering. As if thinking and listening are dangerous tools in the eye of power. This fearful object is introjected into this crisis-ridden world where psychic and physical safety becomes a privilege of the hierarchical identities. I inquire about our role in the widened social trajectory interweaving Ferenczi’s thoughts on democratic psychoanalysis. It’s best defined as a Hungarian synonym, ‘Lélekelemzés‘ meaning soul analysis rather than psycho, indicating the depth of interrelation; we are interlinked with everything around us and before us, the history of a land, communal traumas, current cultures, and socio-political impacts.