Our project seeks to explore the shared unconscious fantasies active within grassroots political groups. We are interested in how psychoanalysis might help political groups better understand the ways in which fantasy both sustains and fragments group life. We see this as political work in its own right: if progressive groups are able to recognise, tolerate and work through challenging relational dynamics, may they also be better able to sustain the work of political struggle?
These questions originate from our own experiences as members of Red Therapy. By reflecting on the unconscious dynamics of our group, we began to explore the fantasies, contradictions and conflicts that shape political groups more broadly. In doing so, we found ourselves asking what psychic capacities enable groups like ours to endure? We presented these emerging ideas at the Political Pathologies conference in Glasgow, inviting audiences to reflect on their experiences of political group life. The discussion centered on the role fantasy plays in creating political bonds, what happens when those fantasies break down, and how groups might move beyond cycles of idealisation and disillusionment.
Building on this material, we will develop a workshop for radical political groups. Centered on a sample of five differently oriented groups, our presentation will reflect on findings from these workshops and consider what they may suggest about the function of the workshops themselves. We ask whether this emergent practice may be understood as an iteration of the free clinic tradition, and if so, what might its aim be? Furthermore, we consider seriously how psychoanalysis can be productively deployed vis-a-vis political group life, and what the role of the clinician could then entail in supporting political struggle.
O futuro da psicanálise depende de um deslocamento radical na maneira dela pensar a si mesma. Sustentamos que o paradigma da origem — organizado em torno da transmissão, da filiação e da autoridade dos centros históricos de legitimação — encontra hoje seus próprios limites. Se a psicanálise pretende permanecer viva, é preciso deixar de perguntar apenas como ela é transmitida para perguntar, sobretudo, como nos tornamos sua herdeira. Em diálogo com nosso livro É de raça que estamos falando: tornar-se herdeiro da psicanálise no Brasil, propomos deslocar a categoria de transmissão pela de herança (tal como delineada por Freud), para pensá-la como uma convocação ética à reinvenção da teoria, da clínica e de suas formas de institucionalização.
Partindo da hipótese de que a psicanálise chega ao Brasil em um contexto atravessado por disputas em torno da ideia de raça, sustentamos que, sobretudo em países marcados pela colonização, tornarse herdeiro implica interrogar as relações raciais de poder que atravessaram sua recepção, institucionalização e produção de saber. A questão da raça deixa, assim, de constituir um novo objeto da psicanálise para tornar-se condição para que a própria psicanálise possa pensar seu futuro. Considerando que a obra freudiana se organiza em torno de mitos originários, perguntamos: que outros mitos podem ser extraídos de Moisés e o Monoteísmo e quais consequências éticas, políticas, epistemológicas e clínicas decorrem desse ato? Propomos o mito da expropriação como operador conceitual para pensar as formas pelas quais pertencimentos, heranças e lugares de enunciação são constituídos pela usurpação.
Por fim, discutimos as consequências clínicas desse deslocamento a partir da experiência da Clínica Social de Psicanálise do Instituto de Estudos da Complexidade (IEC), no Rio de Janeiro, junto à Rede de Atenção a Afetados pela Violência de Estado (RAAVE). Sustentamos que as clínicas públicas de psicanálise não apenas ampliam o acesso, mas deslocam o próprio lugar de produção da teoria psicanalítica. Nesse sentido, propomos pensar uma psicanálise a partir do Sul não como uma identidade geográfica, mas como um horizonte ético, clínico e epistemológico capaz de reinventar os modos de herdar a psicanálise.
The future of psychoanalysis depends upon a radical shift in the way it understands itself. We argue that the paradigm of origin—organized around transmission, filiation, and the authority of historically legitimized centres—has reached its limits. If psychoanalysis is to remain alive, it must move beyond asking merely how it is transmitted and begin asking, above all, how we become its heirs. Drawing on our book It Is Race We Are Talking About: Becoming Heirs to Psychoanalysis in Brazil, we propose shifting from the category of transmission to that of inheritance (as outlined by Freud), understanding inheritance as an ethical call to reinvent psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and their forms of institutionalization.
Starting from the hypothesis that psychoanalysis arrived in Brazil within a context shaped by disputes over the idea of race, we argue that, particularly in societies marked by colonialism, becoming an heir necessarily entails interrogating the racial power relations that have shaped psychoanalysis’s reception, institutionalization, and modes of knowledge production. Race therefore ceases to be merely another object of psychoanalytic inquiry and becomes a condition for psychoanalysis to reflect upon its own future. Given that Freud’s work is structured around founding myths, we ask: what other founding myths can be extracted from Moses and Monotheism, and what ethical, political, epistemological, and clinical consequences follow from this act? We propose the myth of expropriation as a conceptual operator for understanding how belonging, inheritance, and positions of enunciation are constituted through usurpation. Finally, we discuss the clinical implications of this theoretical shift through the experience of the Social Psychoanalytic Clinic at the Institute of Complexity Studies (IEC), in Rio de Janeiro, in collaboration with the Network for the Care of People Affected by State Violence (RAAVE). We argue that public psychoanalytic clinics not only expand access to psychoanalytic care but also relocate the very site from which psychoanalytic theory is produced. In this sense, we propose thinking psychoanalysis from the South not as a geographical identity but as an ethical, clinical, and epistemological horizon capable of reinventing the ways in which psychoanalysis is inherited.
Tomando experiências no Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) brasileiro como analisadoras da prática psicanalítica, neste trabalho interrogo as condições materiais, temporais e institucionais que sustentam a escuta em contextos marcados pelo neoliberalismo. Inicio com uma reflexão metodológica sobre o uso de cenas vividas na instituição para contextos de pesquisa. Partindo da expressão roubar a cena, proponho compreender minha narrativa como analisadora de minha posição como pesquisadora, considerando que o discurso sobre a cena revela algo sobre quem a enuncia. Adoto, assim, uma posição de perspectivação em relação à narração, recusando compreendê-la como um relato neutro.
A primeira cena coloca em foco meu incômodo (ou, o incômodo da narradora) diante dos efeitos produtivos da escuta de um profissional “não psicanalista” e “não antimanicomial” em um Centro de Atenção Psicossocial. Problematizo alguns pressupostos sobre a exclusividade da escuta psicanalítica, com ajuda do que Minozzo e Soreanu chamam de pensamento infraestrutural psicanalítico, mobilizando tal noção para pensar o que é preciso “desacumular, desmembrar, desaprender” a fim de renovar esta prática. Se essa primeira cena coloca em questão o reconhecimento de condições para a escuta, a segunda volta-se para o impacto de uma certa temporalidade no cuidado em instituições públicas de saúde. Aqui, o descompasso sentido pela psicanalista-narradora entre seu ritmo, o do usuário e o dos profissionais da equipe serve para destacar a importância dos pactos coletivos na temporalidade da escuta em contextos neoliberais.
Discuto, enfim, como a gestão privatizada de serviços públicos, a precarização do trabalho e as formas neoliberais de organização institucional incidem sobre a possibilidade de sustentar a escuta no SUS e na prática psicanalítica. Concluo que tomar o SUS como foco permite perspectivar a psicanálise e sua prática, principalmente em contextos públicos, evidenciando características infraestruturais partilhadas.
Taking experiences in the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) as analyzers of psychoanalytic practice, in this work I question the material, temporal and institutional conditions that sustain listening in contexts marked by neoliberalism. I begin with a methodological reflection on the use of scenes lived in the institution for research contexts. Starting from the expression stealing the scene, I propose to understand my narrative as an analyzer of my position as a researcher, considering that the discourse about the scene reveals something about those who enunciate it. Thus, I adopt a position of perspectivization in relation to the narration, refusing to understand it as a neutral account.
The first scene brings into focus my discomfort (or the narrator’s discomfort) in the face of the productive effects of listening to a “non-psychoanalyst” and “non-anti-asylum” professional in a Psychosocial Care Center. I problematize some assumptions about the exclusivity of psychoanalytic listening, with the help of what Minozzo and Soreanu call psychoanalytic infrastructural thinking, mobilizing this notion to think about what it is necessary to “de-accumulate, dismember, unlearn” in order to renew this practice. If this first scene calls into question the recognition of conditions for listening, the second focuses on the impact of a certain temporality on care in public health institutions. Here, the mismatch felt by the psychoanalyst-narrator between her rhythm, that of the user and that of the team professionals serves to highlight the importance of collective pacts in the temporality of listening in neoliberal contexts.
Finally, I discuss how the privatized management of public services, the precariousness of work and the neoliberal forms of institutional organization affect the possibility of sustaining listening in the SUS and in psychoanalytic practice. I conclude that taking the SUS as a focus allows us to put psychoanalysis and its practice into perspective, especially in public contexts, evidencing shared infrastructural characteristics.
Psychoanalysis has long debated who it is for; yet the question of how it reaches people outside clinical and institutional settings remains undertheorized. This paper introduces the concept of psychoanalytic literacy — the capacity to recognize, sit with, and make personal use of unconscious processes in everyday life — and argues that this literacy can be systematically cultivated through creative practice and public pedagogy.
The paper draws on 何苦开心 (Hékǔ Kāixīn), a Chinese-language psychoanalytic practice founded in 2020 that transmits psychoanalysis across multiple forms: essays, courses, fiction, visual art, game design, AI-generated music, and digital reflective tools. With an audience of over 20,000 across its platforms, and a flagship subscription-based learning community, 博雅精神分析 (Liberal Arts Psychoanalysis) of over 260 members, the practice operates at both public and intensive scales. Informed by design-based research methodology, the paper identifies a transmission mechanism distinct from both clinical training and popular explanation: when psychoanalytic processes are described precisely at the level of experience, presented through multiple contexts, and held by the relational presence of a practitioner-educator, participants are activated to construct their own psychological connections. This autonomous linking — not the absorption of expert knowledge — is the basic form of psychoanalytic literacy.
Preliminary research identifies eight dimensions of this literacy, including emotional activation, self-recognition, tolerance of difficult knowledge, holding ambivalence, and meta-literacy. The paper argues that these capacities emerge not through didactic instruction but through a pedagogy of form — one that treats how psychoanalysis is written, designed, and encountered as integral to what it can produce. This reframes the democratization of psychoanalysis as a question not of access alone, but of creative and pedagogical invention.
What does it mean to practise psychoanalysis in a world shaped by climate catastrophe, war, displacement, rising authoritarianism, widening inequalities, and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence into everyday life? As experiences of distress become increasingly entangled with
social, political, technological and ecological realities, the psychoanalytic ideal of neutrality has come under renewed scrutiny (Freud, 1912; Layton, 2006). Yet the question is not simply whether psychoanalysts should become politically active. Framing the issue in this way risks reproducing a familiar opposition between neutrality and activism.
This paper approaches the question differently. It asks whether psychoanalytic responsibility might be understood as a practice of ‘being with’ collective suffering. Drawing on relational and psychosocial perspectives (Mitchell, 1988; Benjamin, 2018; Frosh, 2010), as well as Indian reflections on the relationship between self, culture and society (Kakar, 1982; Nandy, 1983), I propose the concept of “withness” as an ethical orientation for psychoanalytic work in times of polycrisis.
The paper begins from the observation that contemporary suffering is increasingly shaped by forces that exceed the individual: ecological uncertainty, political violence, economic precarity, technological acceleration and the growing mediation of human relationships through digital and AI systems. In such conditions, distress cannot be understood solely as intrapsychic, nor can it be reduced to social explanation alone. Withness refers to a way of remaining present to suffering that is simultaneously psychic and social, personal and collective. Through reflections on community-based psychoanalytic work and spaces of collective care, the paper explores how psychoanalysis might move beyond the consulting room while retaining its distinctive commitment to the unconscious. Rather than asking whether psychoanalysis should remain neutral or become activist, I suggest that the more pressing question is how psychoanalysis can accompany individuals and communities through forms of suffering that are inseparable from the worlds they inhabit. In this sense, “withness” offers one way of reimagining psychoanalytic responsibility and the future of psychoanalysis in an age of polycrisis.
The futures of a clinic attuned to the unconscious are founded in a relational matrix of practitioners who can think about the multiplicity of unconscious layers embedded in the collective. By this we do not mean the kind of thinking that is so often characterized as “applied”: pasting psychoanalytic concepts derived from individualistic theorizing onto the group.
As a point of departure, we describe the first decade of work developed at the Community Psychoanalysis Track and Consortium (CPT&C) housed at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco. The CPT is a training track for psychoanalytic candidates who can count group work in a community agency as one of the analytic cases required for credentialing as a psychoanalyst. Two candidates spend three hours at a non-profit community site where they co-facilitate a reflective project-site group with front line workers, meet weekly with senior agency staff, and reflect upon their process together. This material is brought weekly to the Core Seminar, the main teaching and supervision vehicle for the track. The Core Seminar highlights issues of positionality, role, identity, and location by combining two institutionally trained analysts and two community psychoanalytic practitioners as faculty. The Core Seminar studies its own group process as a way of amplifying the unconscious material that reverberates between the community agency as an organizational body, the facilitated group, the co-facilitating candidate pair, the Core Seminar, and the psychoanalytic institute. Transference is understood less as a movement between individual objects, and more as psychic formations transmitted between groups.
After a brief exposition of the Core Seminar model with examples, we elaborate how this unprecedented innovation in psychoanalytic education is redefining and stretching the psychoanalytic landscape both locally and in collaboration with burgeoning community psychoanalytic initiatives across the globe.
In 1983, two years after Lacan’s death, Moustafa Safouan published Jacques Lacan et la question de la formation des analystes. Safouan clearly understood what was at stake in Lacan’s corpus – the question of the group – which is inherently a question of the history of psychoanalysis and the impossibility of the institution. This tension sat at the center of the Lacan-IPA split, the 1968 student revolution, and subsequent splits regarding Lacan’s two interlocking principles: the passe and analyst’s own authorization before the group. Safouan asks, “is there no way of inventing a ‘new mode of instituting’ that could avoid […] the process of institutionalisation’, a process condemned to repeat itself […] and which compels the forces of institutionalisation to reproduce the very model of institutional power which they are trying to challenge” (p. 87). We know this repetition well.
Using the case of our inter-institutional Community Psychoanalysis Track (CPT) in NYC—a collaboration between institutes, candidates, and public programs—this paper explores interventions within institutions. A core premise of the CPT is that expanding access to psychoanalytic care is impossible without simultaneously reimagining psychoanalytic training and broadening the methods of psychoanalytic practice. The Track directly addresses systemic barriers by offering free psychoanalytic groups to communities, tuition stipends to candidates, and free, comprehensive training to participating institutes.
While clinics have a rich history of radical, experimental approaches that treat the suffering subject and the institution together, remarkably little has changed within formal training. As Safouan notes, “the structure of present-day societies is aimed from one end to another at protecting analysts from psychoanalysis” (p. 24-25). Psychoanalytic formation must, therefore, demand psychoanalytic questions—both of the analyst and of psychoanalysis itself. In the spirit of Safouan and the words of Jacqueline Rose, this paper aims to bring these critical questions out from under their “institutional cover” (p. 7).
In the last decade, there has been growing interest within social movements in mental health practices as both a form of care and a form of resistance. In Italy, collectives and social clinics working from a clinical psychology perspective are closely connected to Franco Basaglia and the deinstitutionalisation movement. Indeed, the Basaglian experience of struggle and liberation, which led to the closure of psychiatric hospitals, has shaped – both culturally and politically – the theoretical framework within which many Italian social clinics develop their practices. Frantz Fanon’s work and Liberation Psychology are also key theoretical references for contemporary struggles. By contrast, psychoanalysis has often been perceived as a bourgeois practice, incompatible with the analysis of socio-economic problems. However, a new generation of psychodynamic therapists and psychoanalysts is becoming increasingly sensitive to the complex challenges that patients face outside the therapy room. Some of them are also involved in social clinics and social movements, engaging in dialogue with therapists from different theoretical backgrounds and exploring ways to break down the barriers of institutional practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. This is not easy: the institutional and academic system remains highly rigid, and it is difficult to find spaces in which to explore and engage with complexity. What about the future? There are many challenges, but two seem particularly important. First, how can we support psychoanalysts who wish to work from a critical perspective? Second, in what kinds of spaces can young students, scholars, and psychologists begin psychoanalytic training that combines a rigorous approach to clinical work with critical reflection on the socio-economic and political struggles of these turbulent times? I will try to address these questions starting from the experience of Italian social clinics both from the researcher’s perspective and the activist’s background.
