Raluca Soreanu

In the past decade, free psychoanalytic clinics around the world have intensified and pluralised their practices: they enlarged their access, they experimented with new psychoanalytic dispositifs, they diversified their relations with other emancipatory movements, and they also explored forms of relating to one another. Is it thus possible to think of free psychoanalytic clinics as a social movement? To engage this question and to make sense of the creativities of free psychoanalytic clinics, I theorise ‘infrastructural thinking’ as a particular kind of orientation to action that puts fantasy and the unconscious at the centre of collective life. Infrastructural thinking means a capacity to consider multiple transferences and ambivalences, as well as new fantasies on gain, accumulation and redistribution. Infrastructural thinking is also linked to an engagement with and practicing of groupness. I argue that in the free clinics, there is a keen awareness and elaboration of questions having to do with groups, collectives and the social bond at large. In some instances, the group is practiced as a method, while a mode of relating ‘from-group-to-group’ becomes possible, constituting a transindividual form. This is in contrast to mainstream psychoanalysis, where a disavowal of the group and groupness has marked our practice, restricting the group imaginary and limiting innovations of the frame that include the group. Finally, infrastructural thinking allows crucial connections to be made between the psychoanalytic frame, and a ‘clinical ecology’, referring to the broader relationship between mind, nature, society and forms of suffering. Drawing on ethnographic and archival material, I construct a ‘scene’ for observing infrastructural thinking at work, in psychoanalytic free clinics in Brazil, in the 1960s and 1970s, and up to our times. 

Are crowds in protest capable of mourning or working-through political traumas? What is the psychic work involved in public morning and how can make we make sense of new political symbols that emerge in ample scenes of protest? Drawing on the Brazilian Uprising of 2013 and its aftermath, I write about a semi-spontaneous mourning, a mourning that is not an effect of a state policy, of a planned ceremony, with a designated time and place. It is a mourning that happens when smaller or greater crowds are formed, and when they symbolize together, when they produce rhythms and forms of synchronicity. It is a kind of mourning that occurs through speech, but also through synchronized vocalizations and movements. It is a kind of mourning that occurs though creating symbols, which, are very precise in their connection to the traumatic marks left by the years of torture, persecution and silence of an oppressive political regime. Ultimately, I write about a symbolizing crowd, capable of complicated constructions, of overlayered references to different historical times, and even of making interpretations. In dialogue with psychoanalytic thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Sándor Ferenczi, I show that under certain conditions, the street and the square become privileged places for public mourning and working-through, because they enable rhythmic attunement, the return of polysemy and the pleasure of analogy.

In this paper, I propose the idea of ‘clinical ecologies’ to explore the way psychoanalysts imagine and practice the boundaries of their own craft. The clinical ecology that I discuss refers to a relationship between mind, nature and society, which puts suffering at the centre of a reconfigured social bond, and which shifts the focus from symptoms and their treatment, to creating a frame and method to rethink race, class, gender, and coloniality. I ask what happens when we imagine an ecology that starts from the suffering, and which thinks about the suffering itself in a psychoanalytic manner. To make sense of how psychoanalysts think of boundaries, I draw on the idea of elasticity, which is central to Sándor Ferenczi’s thinking, and on notions of non-linear temporality in complexity theory. 

The paper focuses on the case of a free clinic in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s and 1980s, an autonomous collective that offered individual and group psychoanalysis to marginal subjects, as well as experimented with ‘play groups’ for children. Drawing on interviews and archival research around the practices of this unique and creative collective, I observe how boundaries were imagined: they are boundaries between the free clinic collective and the mainstream institutionalised psychoanalysis; the boundaries between the private consulting room and a public and often itinerant psychoanalytic practice that followed the subjects in their own territories; the boundaries between the individual and the group, as the group became a key arena of experimentation in this free clinic; the boundaries between the fantasy-full time inside the clinic, and the oppressive and ‘empty’ historical time outside its walls. Ultimately, I argue that the clinicians offer a new arrangement between time, space, money, suffering, and their interrelations, and thus open up a futurity pertaining to a new ‘clinical ecology’. In our times, a re-arrangement of these relations is bound up with our own survival.