WHAT WE ARE UP TO

We are delighted to invite you to join our collective stream on the theme of ‘Radical Listening: Collective practices, histories and possible futures’, which will be a part of the upcoming London Conference in Critical Thought being held at Birkbeck College London, 20th-21st June 2025.

The FREEPSY team will be hosting this discussion and we will hear from colleagues from across the world, scholars, clinicians and activists. 

Can ‘listening’ foster new forms of relationality in a collapsing world? What forms, formats, rituals and infrastructures of listening to one another have made life liveable, enjoyable or, simply, possible in recent times? 

This talk is part of the conference ‘What is “Nature” in Human Nature’, held at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, June 12 and Friday, June 13, 2025

‘What is “Nature” in Human Nature’ is an international conference on the annual theme ‘Being Human’. In memoriam of Donna Orange.

Speakers include: Sam Adriaenssens, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, Max Cavitch, Marcus Coelen, Dominik Drexel, Nadine Hartmann, Esther Hutfless, Ulrike Kistner, Georgia Panteli, Nicholas Ray, Jil Salberg, Raluca Soreanu, Ruud Welten, Herman Westerink, Jenny Willner

On this occasion, Raluca Soreanu will deliver the talk ‘On Trauma and Psychic Splitting in the Psychoanalytic Clinic: Sándor Ferenczi for Our Times’

In this symposium, the FREEPSY collective explores crisis, critique and creativity in relation to psychoanalytic free clinics. We discuss the reconfigurations of the psychoanalytic frame related to racist and heteropatriarchal societal crises. We imagine a post-human feminist intervention in the clinical realm, while exploring the possibility of a drive to care. Finally, in a collective presentation, we talk to the audience about a recent experience of constructing and mobilising a global Free Clinics Network. In this collective conversation, we aim to open up a futurity pertaining to a new ‘clinical ecology’, which puts suffering at the centre of a reconfigured social bond. 

On May 22nd 2025, the FREEPSY collective, in collaboration with sound artist Matthew Faulkner, release the multilingual sound project ‘Multi-Tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum’ via Bandcamp.

This sound art piece starts from voicing ‘multi-tonal readings’ of the book ‘My Farewell to the Yellow House’, written in 1927 by Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalysts István Hollós (2024, 1968 Press). Fragments of the book are read out by more than twenty voices, in seventeen languages. The voices are then composed in a sound art piece. 

On the 23rd of May, 9:30am – 11am (online), the FREEPSY collective and its collaborators will present a creative panel at the Northern Network for Medical Humanities conference: TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers

This creative panel will document an on-going public engagement project, authored by an interdisciplinary research collective (FREEPSY), which consists in voicing ‘multi-tonal readings’ of the book My Farewell to the Yellow House, written in 1927 by Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalysts István Hollós, and recently translated to English (2024, 1968 Press). 

We are delighted to invite you to join our collective stream on the theme of ‘Radical Listening: Collective practices, histories and possible futures’, which will be a part of the upcoming London Conference in Critical Thought being held at Birkbeck College London, 20th-21st June 2025.

The FREEPSY team will be hosting this discussion and we are keen to hear from colleagues from across the world, scholars, clinicians or activists. Please see below the text of the call and a list of invited topics.

The Free Clinics Working Group (FCWG) is a collective space of exchange, learning, thinking and writing promoted by FREEPSY. As an important part of FREEPSY research, the FCWG will hold a space for inscribing historical and contemporary accounts of free clinics into our fields of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies. By reading, sharing, connecting and writing we challenge the hegemonic historiography of our disciplines which sees psychoanalysis as a Eurocentric canon, investing in the vibrancy of praxes that are either from the Global South or peripheric in their own manner, re-inventing psychoanalysis in their own time.

On March 1^st 2025 Raluca Soreanu will be delivering the keynote talk of the Winter Conference at the Guild of Psychotherapists, ‘Brokenness: Fragments and Parts in Psychoanalysis’, in London, where she will be in conversation with Shalini Masih