Part of ascribing the characteristic of a wound to money is to bring into proximity the ways in which currency has a relation to the traumatic. Making tangible a relationality that concerns itself with the body and the lasting effects capital has on daily life. If you have money or not, if you didn’t have it and now you do, or if you’ve always or never had it, money permeates how one comes into contact with the other in a therapeutic dyad. Money yields a visible/invisible force that is performed with and through the body, invaginating its material reality (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). As a relational and libidinal object it moves through each living individual within a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system “the Capitaliocene”, leaving trauma in its wake (1981, hooks; FreePsy Project, 2026). In the money relation there is a typographic etching into flesh that is transgenerational in its contagion (Spillers, 1984). The wound is different for each individual, yet is shared by the collective, marking a group trauma that comes forth when dealing in capital, a conflict that is collectivized among the upper and the lower classes. Writing from this wound the paper is a close reading of Muriel Dimen’s (1994) Money, Love, and Hate : Contradiction and a Paradox in Psychoanalysis, and FreePsy’s (2026), A Dictionary of Money and Psychoanalysis to further fuse talk of money, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies into something bodily. This concept is born out of these texts, my involvement with a Free Clinic in Brooklyn, NY, and a deep engagement in fugitive study and community activism.
This paper for Space 2 responds to the question of how psychoanalysis can engage with or resist state agendas. By working with the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche to address the distinction between drive and instinct, I trace the outline of a paradox in political organising: The modes of struggle required to effect change on a structural level – uncompromising, binary demands addressed to those in power – are antithetical to those required to build a mass movement, which often require an ability to withstand tension, including organising alongside different perspectives. While addressing structural power is aligned with the drive in psychoanalytic theory, building a base of support often requires an approach cognisant of instinct and attachment. This strategic investigation highlights the relevance of psychoanalysis for political organising, hovering in the register of psychoanalytic theory to explore this structuring paradox.
I follow this movement in relation to a Laplanchean metapsychology, supported by my own experiences organising under the banner of Jewishness in the Palestinian liberation movement. By bringing these disparate elements to bear on the theme of psychoanalysis and political resistance, I highlight the necessity of working on multiple registers: A psychoanalytically-informed understanding of change in our political organising; interdisciplinary theory; and a politico-therapeutic practice that stretches beyond the individual to work with the ways we are transformed through political practice. Although we cannot erase this central contradiction, I argue that a clear understanding can inform our work. This approach reveals lines of enquiry central to psychoanalysis’ role in resisting state agendas: How might we attend to drive and instinct in our campaign work at different moments and in different contexts? How can psychoanalysis, as theory and through praxes such as free clinics, operate at this intersection?
O Gbalá: Psicanálise do Racismo e Políticas Públicas é um Programa de Pesquisa e Intervenção Clínica no enfrentamento e tratamento do racismo nas políticas públicas. Sediado em São João del-Rei-MG, suas atuações levam em consideração o território, seus tensionamentos e as estratégias encontradas para enfrentar o racismo, sustentar as identidades afro-brasileiras e lidar com os efeitos subjetivos do racismo. Uma escuta do sujeito que não seja territorializada se torna uma escuta que não possa produzir efeitos de elaboração dos traumas do racismo. O racismo que atravessa as políticas públicas da cidade, desde a educação universitária ao turismo é proveniente de sua história colonial e escravista. Para lidar com estes efeitos, realizamos atendimentos em grupo e individuais de estudantes que acessaram a universidade por ações afirmativas e que não têm os saberes de suas comunidades reconhecidos. Atuamos também no território escutando mulheres encarceradas e os modos de suas maternagem no sistema prisional, nos postos de saúde dos bairros e atendendo às crianças e adolescentes de um grupo de capoeira, além da população em situação de rua e crianças abrigadas. Também organizamos pesquisas sobre como práticas afro-indígenas constroem processos de pertencimento e enfrentamento ao racismo, como as religiões de matriz africanas, os congados, as escolas de samba, e os grupos de capoeira. No aspecto preventivo territorializado, realizamos as atividades que fazem a interface entre os saberes afro-brasileiros, os membros da universidade e a comunidade, como rodas de capoeira aberta a todos e o que denominamos de Feira de Troca de Tempo, em que a comunidade é convidada a oferecer oficinas com seus saberes, trocando experiência e ampliando o leque de possibilidades de lógicas de pertencimento e, com isso, de elaboração dos traumas que o racismo historicamente produzem nas comunidades negras e periféricas do país.
Gbalá: Psychoanalysis of Racism and Public Policy is a research and clinical intervention programme aimed at tackling and addressing racism in public policy. Based in São João del-Rei, Minas Gerais, its work takes into account the local context, its tensions and the strategies devised to tackle racism, uphold Afro-Brazilian identities and address the subjective effects of racism. Listening to the individual in a way that is not rooted in the local context fails to produce the effects necessary for processing the traumas of racism. The racism that permeates the city’s public policies – from university education to tourism – stems from its history of colonialism and slavery. To address these effects, we provide group and individual support to students who have gained entry to university through affirmative action schemes and whose communities’ knowledge is not recognised. We also work on the ground, listening to women in prison and the ways in which they practise motherhood within the prison system, at neighbourhood health centres, and by supporting children and adolescents in a capoeira group, as well as people experiencing homelessness and children in care. We also organise research into how Afro-Indigenous practices foster a sense of belonging and help combat racism, such as African-based religions, the congados, samba schools and capoeira groups. As part of our community-based preventative work, we run activities that bridge Afro-Brazilian knowledge, university members and the community, such as capoeira circles open to all and what we call the ‘Time Exchange Fair’, in which the community is invited to offer workshops based on their own knowledge, exchanging experiences and broadening the range of possibilities for a sense of belonging and, thereby, for coming to terms with the traumas that racism has historically inflicted on the country’s Black and peripheral communities.
The therapeutic relationship lies at the heart of the psychotherapeutic process, and is seen as the effective foundation for any successful intervention. More than ever, there is a need to localise and contextualise the very subjective nature of this relationship, in order to understand its role towards a radical, liberatory pathway of understanding the self. In the context of caste-based oppression in India, a phenomenological and subjective theorisation of the therapeutic relationship is proposed, focusing on the immanent processes within which the relationship materialises. The phenomenology of caste deeply impacts empathic understanding and the embodiment of individual therapeutic relationships. Beyond that, caste is an inherent constructor of the unconscious, playing into hierarchical relationalities in Indian societies. Examining the impact of caste upon the therapeutic alliance, when we think of rupture and the unconscious, becomes necessary at a time when marginalised communities face increasing mental health concerns and lack access to psychotherapeutic support in India. Dr B.R. Ambedkar described caste as ‘a notion, a state of mind’, and theorised untouchability and discrimination as ‘a sort of social nausea of one group towards another group’ (Ambedkar, 1936). This paper attempts to highlight inherent biases, discriminations and notions within care practices, that are derived from the collective experiences of the enslavement and oppression of many communities over centuries across India. How is the caste unconscious embodied in such a context? How does the therapeutic relationship symbolise unconscious hierarchies? The suffering of caste cannot be treated in isolation, with thinkers like Fanon (1952), and Deleuze having situated the unconscious firmly within social contexts such as race, history and geography (Deleuze, 1988). This paper attempts to uncover the caste unconscious, and move towards a language of social relationality and a liberatory praxis of care.
Lara Sheehi’s From The Clinic To The Streets: Psychoanalysis For Revolutionary Futures (2026) impels psychoanalysts to resist the stultifying individualism of psychoanalytic complacency and urges us to lean into the liberatory possibilities of the discipline. This paper seeks to answer this call and develop a practice of both psychic and political militancy that brings us out of our consulting rooms and into our communities. By joining forces with community groups, free psychoanalytic groups have the potential to amplify the scope of access to psychotherapy for communities often left behind by the increasing privatisation, mechanisation and dehumanisation of mental health services, while also giving psychoanalysts the opportunity to fulfil their social responsibility by engaging in an offering of ethical and radical shared practice.
This paper is the framework for a series of experimental groups that will take place under the aegis of Lambeth Mutual Aid (LMA), a community collective based on pre-figurative anarchist principles. LMA’s mission extends beyond easing material and psychic pain by engaging in wealth sharing in the form of no-questions-asked grants, shared meals, information sharing, shared play, community cultural experiences. Instead, LMA seeks to reconfigure our way of relating to one and other. It became clear in Spring 2026 that mental health support was desperately needed, but we found that we lacked resources to fund individual 1-1 therapy, and that NHS and charity offerings for short-term CBT lacked the breadth and depth that our members needed. The idea of the free group in conjunction with the community group was born from this need. This paper is the political and psychoanalytic reasoning behind the idea, and our hope is to extend a hand to other psychoanalysts seeking to radicalise their practice.
Rede DIVAM, a collective of psychoanalysts and feminists, is a psychoanalytic clinic dedicated to listening to gender-based violence. By proposing an approximation between feminism and psychoanalysis, this collective calls into question the intersections between psychoanalytic formulations and their clinical method, their practical reverberations, and their model of training, thereby challenging the inseparability of theory and practice. The network has developed three clinical-training dispositifs: Acolhimento, which corresponds to the first contact with those seeking the network and offers free listening; Covisão, which proposes the horizontalization of supervision and the construction of a feminist ethics of listening, guiding psychoanalytic practice through intersectional analyses of race, gender, and class in clinical cases; and Theoretical-Clinical Circles, horizontal training spaces whose objective is to intertwine psychoanalytic productions with the productions of intersectional feminism and clinical praxis. Covisão is understood to propose two changes in relation to the traditional model of psychoanalytic supervision: the first concerns the horizontal functioning among the participants, and the second concerns the development of a feminist ethics of listening through the incorporation of intersectional analysis. In addition, the network organizes study groups and discussion circles with the aim of articulating discussions between feminisms and psychoanalyses with other fields of knowledge. In the long term, Rede DIVAM aims to expand access to mental health care. However, creating material access alone is not sufficient for women to reach the psychoanalytic couch. When addressing access, it becomes necessary to question which psychoanalysis is, in fact, capable of listening to women and transgender people, and of listening to gender-based violence even when it has already become naturalized in their narratives. Thus, the work of the network consists of recognizing the tensions between the fields of psychoanalysis and intersectional feminism, building intersections, and developing a feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and counter-hegemonic clinical praxis.
