report by Harriet Mossop, PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.
What does psychoanalysis say to radical psychiatry and vice versa? This question permeated the second major conference of the UKRI-funded FREEPSY project, which studies free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics around the world. The conference was organised in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project and Usemi Racial Trauma Clinic, with founder and clinical director, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz.
As Raluca Soreanu, FREEPSY lead, set out in her introductory remarks, the conference asked what psychoanalysis can do when it becomes entangled with other practices and emancipatory movements, and what social and political utopias might emerge from intersections between psychoanalysis and radical psychiatry. Over two intricately structured days, researchers, clinicians, artists, filmmakers and archivists took us to little-known times and places, brought us in contact with ‘othered’ forms of knowledge, and considered the circulation of ideas between radical psychiatry movements in different parts of the world.
Pre-conference Book Launch
The programme started with a pre-conference event at the Freud Museum to celebrate the publication of the first English translation of My Farewell to the Yellow House by psychiatrist István Hollós, published in Hungarian in 1927. The English translation is the first of a new series from the 1968 Press Important little books in psychoanalysis commissioned by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren and the FREEPSY collective.
“My objective was to work for the liberation of the mentally ill. I wanted to shine a light on the thicket of archaic prejudices and promote the dream of a new world. It turned out that the question of the mentally ill is just one aspect of a great tangle of social issues. However, this aspect appears to be a suitable starting point in the process of unravelling the whole thing.”
István Hollós ‘My farewell to the yellow house’
Short talks from the series editors, preface authors, translators and commentators, situated Hollós as part of the first generation of the Budapest school of psychoanalysis, as a contemporary of Ferenczi, and within the lineage of radical psychiatrists such as Laing, Fanon, Tosquelles, Basaglia, Jean Oury, Guattari and others who believed in the societal importance of studying madness and working toward a liberatory practice in ‘mental health’.
“The psychiatric survivors’ movement has long exposed the objectification and the othering of mental health patients in the system within a rigid hierarchy that opposes ‘them’ – the disempowered, stigmatised patients – and ‘us’ – the all-powerful, all-knowledgeable professionals.” Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
The translator, Adrian Courage, spoke from his personal experience of ‘madness’, warning us that ‘there is a madman on the loose’ at the conference and that ‘one person’s psychosis is another person’s reality’. These felt like appropriate words with which to open a conference on radical psychiatry at a time when political and social realities are being fought over at great cost to large parts of the human population.
The talks were followed by a wine and canapes reception in the Freud Museum, and a chance to see the recently installed exhibition ‘Women and Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists’
Conference Day 1
The first day of the conference at the Wellcome Collection began with meditations from Haya Oakley and Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz on the radical psychiatry movement in the UK. Oakley reminded us of the enormous cultural impact of RD Laing’s The Divided Self in 1960; the book became a bestseller at a time when institutionalising asylums were still the norm for the treatment of psychosis.
She spoke of the importance of the creation of non-interventional spaces such as Kingsley Hall and the Philadelphia Project, which still exists today.
Oakley’s significant clinical experience in working with people with psychosis was distilled into the simple but powerful phrase ‘treatment cannot take place without being mindful of how we treat one another’: these words resonated throughout the conference.
Bonnigal-Katz shared similarly valuable clinical insight from her leadership of the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP). Despite its clinical success, the foundational PTP service in Islington has had to close because of a cut in funding. PTP continues to operate as a Community Interest Company in Southwark and Lambeth, consisting of the community psychosis service founded in 2013 and the Usemi Racial Trauma clinic, set up in 2020 in response to the over-representation of individuals from racialised communities among their service users. Such stories are a reminder of the important ideas set in motion by the first FREEPSY conference in 2023 on the economies of free psychoanalysis.
Service users report that the PTP is a ‘safe space’ they can come to when needed: ‘knowing it exists’ is grounding in itself.
What makes the space safe is a combination of validation, empowerment and destigmatisation based on mutual respect and recognition.
Dorothée spoke of the importance for PTP service users of symbolic reconnection through mutual respect and recognition; psychoanalytically speaking, the installation of an ‘other’ who is not out to get them. She stressed that the space is fundamentally non-hierarchical and, as such, it challenges the power dynamic of ‘them-and-us’. Along with a commitment to truthfulness, the clinical stance relies on two simple principles, which, she acknowledged, have been ‘borrowed from Haya’: never assume that you know; it’s never about you. From the perspective of the therapist, this is very demanding. It entails the emotionally difficult work of giving up the clinician’s narcissistic superiority.
The discussant, Ana Minozzo, described clinical supervision in the PTP as a ‘web that makes practice possible’ and drew attention to how valuable – although poignant – it is to record and share these deceptively simple practices as part of the FREEPSY project. Although the Islington clinic has closed, the work of the PTP is far from over.
Saturday Session 2
The second session of the conference continued with a paper from Earl Pennycooke on clinical and political aspects of the analysis of racial trauma. It was based on his clinical work with USEMI, now an essential part of PTP, which aims to meet the specific needs of individuals whose experience of severe mental illness is impacted by race, ethnicity and culture. He considered where Black patients are positioned in the politics of the asylum and everyday life, drawing on W.E.B. DuBois’ formulation of ‘double consciousness’ to emphasise the effect that maintaining two social identities – one for ‘white’ spaces and one for ‘Black’ spaces – has on the psyche.
He positioned his work with USEMI as political because it challenges the racist perception within many mental health services, and the culture at large, that Black men are dangerous. Ethnic inequalities are severe when it comes to acute mental illness. Racist stereotypes not only result in higher rates of incarceration for Black men, but also affect the psyche of Black men who are consistently told by mental health practitioners that their way of being and perceiving the world, is simply wrong.
Dionne Dalley, another co-director of PTP-Usemi, responded to Pennycooke’s paper by reflecting on what it was like for her as a Black woman – ‘a woman like me’ in politician Diane Abbott’s words – to walk into the very white space of the Wellcome Collection.
She emphasised how triggering clinical work can be for the Black clinician when it constantly renders the white gaze visible. During the discussion afterwards, conference attendees questioned how much has really changed in British psychiatry despite multiple institutional projects to ‘decolonise’ clinical practices. As a qualified art therapist, Dione was especially interested in the next item on the conference agenda.
Exhibition Opening & Commentary
Curator Sacha Craddock made the first of several connections with artistic practice by introducing Ana Čvorović’s solo sculptural exhibition ‘Fog’ which was installed in a room at the Wellcome Collection for the duration of the conference. Craddock noted the uniqueness of an artwork commissioned to run alongside an academic conference and highlighted the plays with scale, precarity and the relations between found and made objects in Čvorović’s work.
Viewing the installation during the lunch break, I reflected on the artist’s extensive use of wire, glass and semi-transparent plastic to create different spaces, both intimate and troubling; very apt for a conference that often considered the porosity or opaqueness of asylum walls, cell walls, walls between the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’, and internal walls within the psyche.
Please see the video compilation of exhibition photos below, created by designer Hugo Coria.
Saturday Session 3
In the afternoon session we turned to asylums in Southern Europe. Camille Robcis spoke about Francesc Tosquelles and the Saint-Alban asylum experiment, marking the first appearance of another psychiatrist whose name reverberated loudly throughout the two days of the conference. Tosquelles’ experiences in a concentration camp during World War I convinced him that it was possible to practice psychiatry anywhere.
Robcis considered how institutional psychotherapy at Saint-Alban drew on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; in particular, Lacan’s theoretical work in extending psychoanalysis to patients with psychosis. The psychiatrists at Saint-Alban gave the patients hammers to tear down the walls between the hospital and the village after the Second World War – a deeply symbolic act. Returning to the conditions of possibility for work with psychotic patients discussed by Oakley and Bonnigal-Katz, Robcis emphasised the importance of recognising the power dynamics at play in any institution – even one making efforts to tear down the walls between patients and medical staff – for transferential working through to take place.
Ramsey McGlazer then spoke about Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, a driving force in the de-institutionalisation movement in Italy in the 1970s who was known as ‘the man who closed the asylum’. Reading Basaglia through the analytic concept of ‘afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit), McGlazer considered the relevance of Basaglia’s work on institutional negation at the current time of abolition and de-policing. Discussant Candela Potente encouraged us to consider the operation of afterwardsness in Basaglia’s different positions as, first, a political inmate and later, an asylum director, in a non-linear temporality. Sadly, the scheduled talk by Gabriel N. Mendes Fanonian Sociogeny and the Antiracist Psychiatry of Harlem NY’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic did not take place. We hope to get a copy of Gabriel’s talk at a later date.
The day closed with an interesting presentation by archivist Ewan O’Neill on the FREEPSY archive of objects and documents, which is currently being compiled and catalogued as part of the research project. Mónika Takács then discussed archival work at the Ferenczi House in Budapest. I was able to browse the thought-provoking installation of objects from the FREEPSY archive during tea and coffee breaks; the presence of the archive brought a welcome materiality to the history and theory presented elsewhere.
Film Screening Saturday
The evening session of the conference was a showing of Mireia Sallarès 2021 film Història potencial de Francesc Tosquelles, Catalunya i la por’ (Potential history of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and fear), followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker.
Sallarès’ inventive and revolutionary film-making took us from a fictionalised letter from Tosquelles to General Franco read by non-professional actors and filmed live in bars in Catalonia, to a discussion of Tosquelles’ legacy led by sex workers and nuns, and first-hand stories of revolutionary psychiatric work with Tosquelles. The lively panel discussion considered the connections between revolutionary politics, revolutionary therapy, and revolutionary filmmaking. The day ended with conference attendees exhausted and satisfied.
Conference Day 2
Session 1
The second day of the conference started with a session by Hungarian colleagues, Anna Borgos, Júlia Gyimesi and Antal Bókay.
Anna Borgos opened the day with her fascinating research on the medical records of hysterical patients from a Budapest clinic from 1907 to 1938, revealing them as a valuable archival source of information about the patients’ family and social conditions as well as their mental illness.
Borgos stressed social and cultural influences on hysterical patients’ narratives and posited the case study as a joint creation between patient, doctor, and the culture that shapes them.
Júlia Gyimesi spoke next and set out the complex historical relationship between esotericism and psychoanalysis, arguing that esotericism has been symptomatically repressed by mainstream psychoanalysis despite the significant involvement of figures like Ferenczi, Hollós, Balint, Silber and, of course, Jung.
She suggested that esoteric empirical material provided fertile ground for the early development of psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, symbol formation, and the collective unconscious.
Antal Bókay then provided an enigmatic reading of different versions of Ferenczi’s paper Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy. Ferenczi’s answer to the fundamentally psychoanalytic question ‘What do children know about sex?’ implied that sexual pedagogy is a product of significant family and social processes and relationships; Bókay reminded us that Ferenczi took child sexual abuse more seriously than Freud.
He went on to explain Ferenczi’s argument that children’s pleasure was unnecessarily repressed by the unconscious anxiety of adults about sexuality, and argued for a revolution in pedagogy that would protect children from this unnecessary repression. This suggested radical pedagogical possibilities, including in adult educational institutions.
Discussant Ana Tomcic responded by drawing attention to these changing views on pedagogy in psychoanalysis and considering what kind of psychoanalysis would be at the heart of a free, egalitarian society. She argued that we need to listen to the voices of patients, both historical and contemporary, referencing Adrian Courage’s intervention – ‘there’s a madman on the loose’ – from the Friday evening book launch. Perhaps triggered by the presentation on esotericism, the panel closed with a member of the audience sharing a dream of prisons suspended in the cosmos.
Sunday Session 2
After the morning break, attention moved to France, and the little-known Centre d’Etudes de Recherche et de Formation Institutionelle (CERFI) which was in operation from 1967 until 1987. CERFI experimented with collective research practices, analysis of the social unconscious, and militant action-research in institutional programming. Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira presented a short history of this extraordinary research organisation whose collaborators included figures such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. CERFI worked along Deleuzian lines to collectivise processes, strengthen transversal aspects of life, avoid hierarchies, and create ‘rhizomatic’ forms of organisation to counteract the bureaucratic tendencies of institutions.
After starting with experiments with psychoanalysis by letter and a research journal, CERFI was given many ‘programming’ contracts by the French state. ‘Programming’ was situated by the speakers as an ongoing analytic process in which institutional needs and desires are reflected on; a process of subverting the state from the inside using an analytic machine.
They highlighted the relevance of this important exploration of the relationship between militancy and analysis to today’s psychiatric (and other) institutions. The first discussant, Andersen Santos, shared a video of his time at the La Borde psychiatric institution, bringing subversive institutional programming vividly to life, while Lizaveta van Munsteren spoke of overcoming the anxiety of ‘difference’.
Sunday Session 3
The final panel of papers considered ‘asylum art’. Tania Rivera spoke of the deeply problematic positioning of art made by people in asylums as art brut: art that was made by people who were seen as being totally removed from culture, or even ‘primitives’. She shared useful counterbalances from a 1940s Brazilian exhibition which mixed art by people in psychiatric institutions with other artists’ work.
Rivera suggested reading Lygia Clarke’s 1968 work Straightjacket as indicating that the truly sick person is the neurotic assimilated through the system, and that the ‘borderline’ creates cultures through artistic practice.
Raluca Soreanu and Monika Perenyei then presented a meditation on what they called the ‘Dream Album’ – a montage of photos, drawings, paintings and texts created by patients in the Budapest asylum and now held in the Angyalföld Museum.
Soreanu and Perenyei suggested that the album’s surprising juxtapositions of images and text could provoke fresh associations and new ways of working through suffering, and suggested connections towards Ferenczi’s idea of psychic fragments that have a life of their own. What does it mean to think of, and with, fragments?
Matt ffytche then took us on a final visit to Saint Alban using the diaries and artwork of Aimable Janet, a patient, and the observations of his psychiatrist Jean Oury. Working with the chaotic and fragmentary nature of Janet’s notebooks, ffytche traced different possible meanings of death for Janet: social death, the asylum, and the loss of rights to the body.
The discussant, Magda Schmukaller, suggested that the asylum, as a place where artistic practice took place, could (paradoxically) be a site for challenging the fear of madness.
Sunday Session 4
The conference closed with a free-flowing discussion between speakers and audience members. We reflected that patients’ experiences had been represented indirectly though their artwork, clinical records, and diaries throughout the conference: one attendee asked, referencing a familiar cry from disability and MAD movements, “what happened to ‘nothing about us without us’”? Others pointed out that the lines are much more blurred than this; in addition to Adrian Courage, who spoke about his experiences of madness, many of the speakers and audience members would have some direct experience of mental illness. There was certainly more than one mad person ‘on the loose’ during the conference.
I was left wondering what residual fear of madness had caused this to be largely unsaid, and which internal and institutional walls had yet to be broken down by patients’ hammers. We closed by reflecting on the representation of psychoanalysis at the conference: without models, strong theory, or a clinic, radical work can take place beyond these traditional conceptions. Judging by the conversations in the conference room and corridors afterwards, the conference also functioned as a nexus to bring together researchers, clinicians, MAD activists and artists from several countries, enabling new forms of collaboration across institutional lines. This FREEPSY conference will live on, well past its official close, in the social and political utopias that it helped us to dream together.
