Barry Watt, Co-Director and Senior Psychotherapist at the Psychosis Therapy Project, London, reflects on the FREEPSY conference held at The Freud Museum London & online on October 13-14, 2023.
In 2021 Joanna Ryan, Ivan Ward and Raluca Soreanu convened two successful conferences, exploring and surveying the history and practices of free psychoanalytic clinics: Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis. These conferences would lead to the formation of the innovative FREEPSY initiative, based at the University of Essex. On October 13-14, 2023, building on the success of the original Psychoanalysis for the People conferences, the FREEPSY initiative convened a two-day conference on the topic of Money and Psychoanalysis: Economies of Care. Whereas the preceding conferences had foregrounded the historical realities and the daily, practical, details of extending psychoanalytic treatments to those traditionally financially inhibited from accessing them, this October’s Money and Psychoanalysis conference began the challenging undertaking of curating an array of novel languages and perspectives to theorise these diverse practices and creative projects.
The conference began with a theoretically rich and innovative presentation by Raluca Soreanu, whose paper ‘On Psychoanalytic Convertibility and Infrastructural Thinking’, in many ways provided the underpinning for the discussions that followed. Drawing on her recent ethnographic work in Brazil, where she heard first-hand about how free and low-cost clinics responded creatively to lack of access to money by establishing alternative modes of accumulation and redistribution, Soreanu introduced a raft of key concepts that were to prove indispensable to the conference’s collective thinking. In particular, the notion of ‘infrastructural thinking’, was returned to time again in discussions and in subsequent presentations. By shifting the emphasis from the individualism inherent in many traditional analytical approaches to puzzling out how organisations or groups think about and respond to practical challenges they encounter in the day-to-day functioning, infrastructural thinking opened the space for theorising simultaneously psychically and materially at a collective, organisational level, whilst avoiding the deterministic and ossifying pitfalls of much structuralist or functionalist theorising.
Following Soreanu’s pathbreaking presentation, professor and social thinker Giuseppe Cocco from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, introduced us to some key aspects of the thinking contained in Living Currency. This is a seminal work by legendary but frequently overlooked philosopher Pierre Klossowski. Living Currency was only translated into English in 2017, meaning that many of its indispensable ideas are still not widely known in the English-speaking world. Cocco mobilised Klossowski’s thought to challenge dominant liberal ideas surrounding the post-industrial or ‘informational’ economy, that held out the promise of safeguarding the living body from the direct exploitation to which it was subjected in previous capitalist regimes of extraction and accumulation. Instead, Cocco alerted us to the deeply unsettling insight that in the financialised economy, the living body itself is inserted even more directly than before into the dynamics of capital accumulation, because financialised capital can cast its net much further than industrialised capitalism, monetising life in its affective and relational dimensions.
Generously joining us on Zoom all the way from California, Francisco J. González’s presentation gave us the opportunity to consider how many of the theoretical aspects of the evening’s discussion related to issues of psychoanalytic training. As is well known, psychoanalytic trainings have long privileged individual work with patients in private practice settings guided by individual supervision. González spoke to us about the Community Psychoanalysis Track (CPT) of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), and in particular ‘transmural psychoanalysis’, that dovetails with the idea of ‘infrastructural thinking’. Established in 2016, the CPT enables training candidates to swap one of three mandatory psychoanalytic training cases, with a collectively and collaboratively constructed project based in a community mental health setting. This revolutionary training program pushes psychoanalysis out from the traditional setting of the consulting room and engages with the lived, material lives of those seeking treatment from within the communities in which they are based. Crucially, this program breaks with the atomisation of traditional training structures, by referring the supervision of cases to the group or collective. This invited questions of the traditional role and place of psychoanalysis in social life, as well as raising challenging questions around the limits and possibilities of a truly collectivised psychoanalysis, that actively engages problematics of inclusion, co-construction of treatment and issues of social justice.
One of the most enjoyable, and enlivening, aspects of the conference for me as an audience member, was the responses and provocations by the Discussants, who had the unenviable task of replying to the more extended papers with thoughts and observations of their own. On the Friday evening, the trio of Ana Minozzo, Lizaveta van Munsteren and Ana Tomcic all contributed brief but sparkling responses to Soreanu’s paper. These interventions introduced some breathing space into the proceedings, as well as levity and laughter, into the serious work of reminding us of the patriarchal foundations to the current neoliberal capitalist economy and the manners it interfaces with the classical, Freudian libidinal economy.
I was unable to attend the Saturday morning, due to prior teaching commitments. However, when I arrived in the afternoon, the papers by Guilaine Kinouani, Ian Parker and Dany Nobus all received glowing reviews from those in attendance. Several audience members mentioned, in particular, Dorothée Bonigal-Katz’s response to Nobus’s presentation, that drew attention to the hostile funding environment for small charities operating on a shoestring in the United Kingdom. Kinouani’s presentation was also cited to me as foregrounding the importance of histories of material deprivation in clinical work and how, for many clients with such histories, they can find that they are ill-served in a psychoanalytic clinic embedded within neoliberal logics of individualism. Attendees commented how these contributions brought much of the theoretical discussions back to terra firma, providing an anchoring point for many of the conceptual innovations that had been explored so far.
Saturday afternoon featured two theoretically subtle and rigorous presentations from Tales Ab’Sáber and Daniel Feldmann, that shifted the terrain of discussion considerably by introducing the perspective of economic discourse. Zooming in from Brazil, Ab’Sáber’s and Feldmann’s contributions not only brought into view the truly international nature of the FREEPSY initiative with its transnational collaborations, but also the initiative’s theoretical ambitions. If the Psychoanalysis for the People conference series had offered a broad tapestry of the many current and historical practices constitutive of providing free and low-cost psychoanalysis, Ab’Sáber’s and Feldmann’s presentation attempted to situate these praxes within visions for a renewed political economy, by reworking fundamental economic principles and precepts, from a decolonial and anti-capitalist perspective. Deanne Bell’s formidable response, in her role as Discussant, challenged the duo to spell out some of the ways in which their rich thinking might be out into practice within the context of a hegemonic neoliberalism that is the backdrop to current decolonial struggles, especially in the global south and for non-white peoples.
The final Roundtable offered a considerable contrast from the rest of the conference, by bringing the domain of aesthetics and artistic production into the conversation. Ana Čvorović presented and discussed some of her extraordinarily powerful work, whilst Barbara Szaniecki responded with her deep impressions and thought-provoking commentary. Čvorović’s work, that situates itself at the intersection between psychoanalysis and politics and speaks to themes of internal borders and national borders, the ‘war inside’ and the ‘war outside’, included different assemblages of found mattresses from baby’s cots. This spoke to the experiences of many children, trapped without food or care in orphanages during the civil war in the Former Yugoslavia, Čvorović’s former homeland. If much of the conference’s discussion had, so far, concentrated on alternative economies of care, differential clinical ecologies and the expansion of the mental health commons, then Čvorović’s work and the commentary of Szaniecki, introduced the neglected aspect of the economies of different dream work. The session ended with Paul Atkinson’s outline of his establishment of the Free Psychotherapy Network, that brought the conference full circle and, in many ways, established the link with many of the presentations at the prior Psychoanalysis for the People conferences last year and their more praxis orientated focus.
The closing Q&A saw a number of questions posed and observations made, that had not found the space to be articulated fully over the conference’s two days. Noticeable, was the extent to which those interventions expressed a wish for papers with a more praxis-oriented dimension, as had been prominently featured at last year’s conferences. As I have been remarking upon throughout this blog, that aspect of the exploration and discussion of free clinics was already extensively explored in the FREEPSY initiative’s previous two conferences and that this conference was, from my point of view, an attempt to bring novel theorisation to these diverse praxes.
I wonder, in which case, whether what in part was being expressed in the Q&A was the fantasy of more immediate answers to how to implement the transformative ideas that had been explored over the conference’s two days, alongside a deflationary realisation of the aggressively inimical social, political and economic backdrop for doing so. I was reminded of the history of therapeutic communities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that, to an extent, prefigure many of the practices and ideas that were under discussion at the conference. Aside from the economic dimension, how possible would it now be to establish a therapeutic community that situated itself outside of the dominant psychiatric regime and the numerous limitations on the freedom and creativity of practice that the regulation of such a regime imposes? Such regulatory restrictions would severely delimit the kind of emancipatory and creative work of much infrastructural thinking.
To allow such despondency to be the lingering sentiment would, however, be to do an injustice to the remarkable achievement for two days of lively, varied and rigorous debate and discussion that the FREEPSY team once again pulled off. To return to those moments over the conference that highlighted the real therapeutic and community-building work that can happen, even under the most oppressive and resource-depleted of circumstances, the lesson I left with concerned the real possibilities of building liberatory and transformative collective therapeutic projects within the repressive material and ideological conditions within which we all find ourselves. What has stayed with me most is the many ways that practitioners and clients have found, together, of turning the considerable forces arrayed against them back upon those very forces themselves. Carving out spaces of hope and possibility, community and connection, meaning and significance, that might provide ongoing reserves of different kinds of value, which can be drawn upon to fund the energy and tenacity for sustaining the social mission of psychoanalysis: a psychoanalysis that is available for all, regardless of their means or their circumstances.
Barry Watt is a Co-Director and Senior Psychotherapist at the Psychosis Therapy Project, London. Until earlier this year, he was the Senior Psychotherapist at St Mungo’s Community Housing Association, where he worked psychoanalytically with individuals experiencing homelessness. He serves on the Editorial Board of the British Journal for Psychotherapy, is a member of the Training Committee for the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a member of the Curriculum Advisory Group for the Association of Individual and Group Psychotherapy.
The Psychosis Therapy Project is one of FREEPSY’s close collaborators.
