WHAT WE ARE UP TO

Edited by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren & the FREEPSY collective. Launched in November 2024. First title: István Hollós, My Farewell to the Yellow House (first published in Hungarian in 1927, translated to English by Adrian Courage)

The series ‘Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis’ (edited by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren & the FREEPSY collective) will launch radical contributions to psychoanalysis that have not yet been translated into English. Inspired by the early psychoanalytic movement of free clinics, the series brings to the fore socially and politically engaged psychoanalysis, invested in issues such as society’s gaze upon madness, the possibility of collective mental health care, or the structuring nature of race, class or gender for psychoanalytic listening. The authors in this series contribute to rethinking fundamental psychoanalytic concepts and offer innovative answers to the question: what can psychoanalysis do?

report by Harriet Mossop, PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

What does psychoanalysis say to radical psychiatry and vice versa? This question permeated the second major conference of the UKRI-funded FREEPSY project, which studies free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics around the world. The conference was organised in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project and Usemi Racial Trauma Clinic, with founder and clinical director, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz.

As Raluca Soreanu, FREEPSY lead, set out in her introductory remarks, the conference asked what psychoanalysis can do when it becomes entangled with other practices and emancipatory movements, and what social and political utopias might emerge from intersections between psychoanalysis and radical psychiatry. Over two intricately structured days, researchers, clinicians, artists, filmmakers and archivists took us to little-known times and places, brought us in contact with ‘othered’ forms of knowledge, and considered the circulation of ideas between radical psychiatry movements in different parts of the world.

A solo presentation by Ana Čvorović curated by Sacha Craddock, Wellcome Collection.

Commentary by Sacha Craddock:

Čvorović’s sculpture releases the power of association in the way it manages to play with suggestions of comfort as well as discomfort. By using a strange, distorted hint at precarity, the artist manages to construct, and combine, an inevitable mixture of fact and fiction. With elements scaled up and down, with the delight of display alluding to gain, as well as ultimate loss, Čvorović points out, however, and yet ultimately withholds, any sense of full explanation. The work hints at the way that the material fact imbedded in a found object, for instance, is folded in with the typical struggle between value and non-value that sculpture will inevitably carry.

The book launch panel discussion (6:00pm – 7:30pm) will be followed by a wine reception (7:30pm – 8pm). The book launch panel discussion is available both in person and online, hosted by the Freud Museum London.

My Farewell to the Yellow House is an event-book: a manifesto that aims to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care, written in 1927 by a unique and little-known voice of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist István Hollós. Nearly one century after its publication in Hungarian, the English translation captures Hollós’s playful, passionate, insightful, ironic and self-ironic style.  

Before the start of the new academic year, the FREEPSY team hosted our second edition of the Free Clinics Working Group. This time, we were guided by the following question:  What are the obstacles and opportunities of establishing free psychoanalytic clinics in the UK in 2024? 

More than Klein’s Rebel Daughter

In current histories of psychoanalysis, Melitta Schmideberg still lives under the shadow of her mother, Melanie Klein. If Schmideberg’s name is mentioned at all, it is in the context of the Controversial Discussions that took place at the British Psychoanalytical Society in the early 1940s. Instead of focusing on Schmideberg’s relationship with Klein, I wish to contribute to a different historical account of Klein’s rebellious daughter: that of a socially engaged, passionate, original analyst who devoted her life to working with marginalised people and who helped to found two successful institutes for the psychological treatment of offenders, one in the UK and another in the USA.

The launch took place at Swedenborg House on 16 September 2024, with commentaries by Raluca Soreanu, Rodrigo Nunes, Stephen Frosh and Kati Gray.

Organised by the FREEPSY project in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project.

Register via Eventbrite.

Psychoanalytically informed therapeutic communities constitute an important, but often forgotten, chapter in the history of applied psychoanalysis. Apart from the original experiments by analysts and educators such as August Aichhorn or Homer Lane, little is known about the vibrant and socially progressive nature of residential communities established during and in the aftermath of the Second World War. This article explores the uses of psychoanalysis in four such communities that worked with antisocial children and young people: the Hawkspur Camp, established in 1936 by David Wills and Marjorie Franklin; the Barns Hostel, a hostel for ‘unmanageable’ child evacuees from Edinburgh and Glasgow, active during the Second World War; the Reynolds House, a residential home for boys leaving approved schools who had no home to return to, started in London in 1963; and the Cotswold Community, a residential school for ‘maladjusted’ children in Wiltshire, transformed into a therapeutic community in 1967. Apart from the modifications of psychoanalytic methods made necessary by this environment, a key question posed by these communities is what constitutes healing social relationships at large, and how psychoanalysis can be instrumental in building and maintaining them.

The article is available at:
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2024.0512