What does progressive psychoanalysis look like in our times, and what are the societal implications of its practices? This strand of our project will unpack the psychic and social life of the free clinics, drawing on ethnographic research. It will approach the free clinics as laboratories of political experimentation, theorising their forms of creativity and following their modes of relationality. Our project engages a growing debate on the commons, by discussing the ‘mental health commons’ created through the psychoanalytic free clinics. Mental health commoning is the work of actively weaving and sustaining communities of collaboration and action around the dimension of life that has to do with psychic suffering and fantasy. Theorising ‘clinical ecologies’, our project captures the reconfiguration of the relationship between mind, nature and society happening when suffering is placed at the core of the social bond. Furthermore, our project traces the boundary-work in the encounter of psychoanalysis with other fields of practice, such as medicine; and with other systems of thought and emancipatory struggles.
Connected terms: psychoanalytic convertibility, mental health commons, clinical ecologies, collective creativity
