Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times
We are delighted to announce the publication of Black Oedipus by Rita Segato, newly translated from Spanish by Ramsey McGlazer and published by 1968 Press as part of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis series. On 10 February, we celebrated the book’s launch with an evening symposium hosted by Freud Museum, bringing together the author, translator, and an extraordinary group of scholars, writers, and psychoanalysts for a rich and urgent conversation.
New article published in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, authored by Raluca Soreanu & Ana Minozzo, available in Open Access format.
Continue reading “‘Manifesto for Infrastructural Thinking: Living with Psychoanalysis in a Glitch’, by Raluca Soreanu & Ana Minozzo”We are happy to announce the launch of A Dictionary of Money and Psychoanalysis.
Support maintaining PPS at Essex as an independent department.
Online Conference, September 5th and 6th 2026
We would like to invite all those interested in the work of Sabina Spielrein and early women analysts to contribute to the upcoming conference organised by one of our FREEPSY team members and other colleagues at the University of Essex. The conference explores the extraordinary thinking of Sabina Spielrein, developing her pioneering legacy in the world of psychoanalysis and beyond.
14-week course with Dr. Klara Naszkowska & Dr. Ana Tomčić
The course will focus on Sabina Spielrein, Margarethe Hilferding, Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Lou Andreas Salomé, Judith Kestenberg, Vilma Kovacs, Clara Happel, Helene Deutsch, Barbara Low, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Alberta Szalita, among other women pioneers of psychoanalysis.
Continue reading “EARLY WOMEN PSYCHOANALYSTS”Ana Tomčić uses the case of the modernist writer and film critic Bryher to discuss how psychoanalysis viewed trans identities and trans trainees in the 1920s and 1930s.
They were the child of a shipping magnate and one of the richest people in the UK. Roughly since the age of four, and possibly before that, they expressed a deep wish to be a boy. They grew up on “boys’” novels and adventure tales. They developed a taste for literature and history, partly because the gender fluidity of ancient societies and Elizabethan theatre allowed for more expansiveness than the world in which they were forced to inhabit: the turn-of-the-century upper-middle-class British society. Just after World War I, they fell in love with the American poet Hilda Doolittle. During their decades-long relationship, they formed a household with their friend and occasional partner Kenneth Macpherson, a bisexual man. Bryher and Macpherson formally adopted H.D.’s daughter Perdita. By today’s standards, the trio were a queer, polyamorous family raising a child. They also made films together, founded the influential, progressive film magazine Close Up and profoundly influenced each other’s writing. However, the group of queer writers and filmmakers shared another common interest: psychoanalysis.
Continue reading “Psychoanalysis and Gender Fluidity in the 1920s: the Case of Bryher”Grupo Diversidad at Hospital Ameghino in Buenos Aires.
In the landscape of global mental health, the pioneering work emerging from Buenos Aires’s Hospital CSM N° 3 “Arturo Ameghino” offers a vital model for psychoanalytic practice in the field of diversity. The recent official establishment of the “Área Diversidad” in December 2024 represents a significant institutional milestone, yet it is the culmination of a years-long, pre-existing clinical commitment. A dedicated group of clinicians has long been forging a path of specialized accompaniment for the LGBTTIQA+ community, with a particular focus on transgender and non-binary children, adolescents, and adults. Their work demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory, when critically engaged, can be mobilized to provide affirming and nuanced care, challenging the historical pathologization of diverse gender and sexual experiences.
What makes this initiative particularly instructive for an international audience is its deeply embedded methodology. The clinicians operate not in an institutional vacuum but within a vibrant ecosystem of care, maintaining close collaboration with city-wide health networks and community activists. This dialogue between clinic, community, and public health policy enriches their practice, allowing them to refine an approach that is both theoretically robust and socially responsive. By sharing their journey from a grassroots collective to an officially sanctioned area, these colleagues from Buenos Aires provide a powerful blueprint. They teach us how to build bridges, challenge institutional inertia, and pioneer a contemporary, ethical psychoanalysis that holds the singular subject at its core—a lesson of profound importance for colleagues worldwide.
*This text was written in collaboration by Cecilia Montenegro, a member of the Diversity Group of CSM No. 3 Ameghino, and Alba Rueda. Alba Rueda is an Argentine trans activist and politician, and a prominent defender of the human rights of LGBTIQ+ people from the Global South. She served as Undersecretary for Diversity Policies in the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity (2020–2022), and later as Argentina’s Special Representative on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade, and Worship.
Continue reading “Trans Experiences and Testimonies. On the Importance of Recovering Marginalised Knowledge. Cecilia Montenegro Alba Rueda”On December 5 2025, Raluca Soreanu will deliver the Memorial Lecture in Bristol, as part of the Balint Society UK’s Bristol Study Day
On October 8 2025 FREEPSY presented at the Applied Section Meeting of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London.
In this presentation, we argued that psychoanalytic clinics have had rich political and clinical ‘lives’ over the past century, but these have often remained invisible. We see psychoanalytic free clinics, in their plural and polyvocal manifestations, as a global movement, connected by a series of important theoretical-clinical principles, by an ethos, and by a rich set of revisions and innovations in the domain of the psychoanalytic frame. All these innovations need to be both historicised and theorised. In our discussion, we traced the metamorphoses of Freud’s couch, which happen when psychoanalysis becomes entangled with emancipatory movements and liberation struggles of various kinds, and engages with the realities of social inequalities based on race, class, gender, poverty, and other forms of marginalization. We offered a critique of the idea of ‘applied psychoanalysis’ and placed the notion of ‘infrastructures’ and ‘infrastructural thinking’ at the heart of understanding how autonomous collectives of clinicians invested in the social mission of psychoanalysis innovate, by putting time, space, money, and suffering in new relations. Drawing on theoretical, historical, ethnographic and arts methods research, we moved from the ‘Barefoot Psychoanalyst’ in the 60s and 70s in the UK, to the work of Budapest Polyclinic pioneers in the 20s and 30s, to Brazilian antiracist free clinics in the past decade, to the artistic figuration of a clinic with porous and pliable boundaries.
Continue reading ““100 Years of Innovation and Critique: On Free Psychoanalytic Clinics as a Global Movement” — A collective presentation by the FREEPSY project team at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.”On November 22, Raluca Soreanu will attend the International Conference ‘De Sándor Ferenczi à l’École de Budapest: Témoins contemporains’ and present the paper ‘La vie psychique des fragments : Sur la traversée d’une mosaïque’
