Commentary for the launch of the special issue 24(3) of Psychoanalysis & History of December 2022, on ‘Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’, The Freud Museum, February 25th 2023
Image: Print, ink on paper, Lorna ConroyI was delighted to attend the launch of the FREEPSY project at the Freud Museum, which was shared with the launch of the special issue of Psychoanalysis and History devoted to ‘Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’. As a historian of psychoanalysis, one question attracts my attention more than any other: Why did it take 100 years, from 1918 when Freud first read his address on ‘Lines of advance in Psycho-analytic Therapy’ (and note the special combination of ‘psychoanalysis and therapy’ in that title) to Elizabeth Danto’s book on Freud’s Free Clinics, and to this launch? Why 100 years – that’s an unfeasibly long time for an official mission to go missing.
There are many answers to that question, which is taken up by many of the pieces in the journal issue, at least one of which has to do with what psychoanalytic traditions and psychoanalytic historiography has counted as the narrative of the profession; and what it has excluded – what it marginalises and forgets or resists, for many different reasons. A part of the mission for the journal, as I see it, and also for the FREEPSY project, is about not telling the history of psychoanalysis, but ‘untelling’ it, disassembling it, composing it from quite foreign perspectives.
But I think it is not ultimately about historiography. I think it is more about moments and places where the demand to materialise ‘psychoanalysis for the people’, and the free clinic, and the pressure of that demand, becomes unavoidable and spills over into creative action. 1918-19 in central Europe – again for obvious reasons – was one of those times. And, personally, I feel it is only because of that time, that catastrophe, that Freud was able to hear himself imagining this psychoanalysis for the people in a way in which, perhaps in the 1930s, the time of Civilization and its Discontents, he could not. 1919 was the time that gave birth to Red Vienna, and Red Hungary and so on.
Perhaps now, too, is a time, when, for whatever reason, or for a multitude of reasons, this pressure, this demand for a psychoanalysis for the people, has become very high, very insistent, as too is our willingness to hear that demand. All of this is spoken about very eloquently in this volume, and from many different quarters. It is a demand levelled not just at recovering histories, but also at reimagining practices – which takes a lot of effort, a lot of agility and ethical commitment, a lot of courage and clinical brilliance to reimagine, and to rematerialize in the kinds of ways Kwame Yonatan and others spoke about at the launch.
Finally, it is a question not just of what psychoanalysis can offer to ‘the people’ – but really, what the people rightly demand of psychoanalysis, in an ‘are you with us or against us’ kind of way. So, whether or not you are psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, historians or academics, you too can take part in posing this demand, asking these questions, and imagining these transmutations of psychoanalysis in a time of need. New histories are essentially attempts at newly imagining what can be made present to us – what we can make present in the contemporary world, in the rush of urgent events, sometimes, seemingly unimaginably, for free.
