WHAT WE ARE UP TO

A solo presentation by Ana Čvorović curated by Sasha 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.

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

If you have been following our research you may have already taken notice of the particular richness of radical and creative efforts coming from our colleagues in Brazil. This Latin American country is one of our research sites and as we conduct interviews,  archival research, travel for ethnographic observations and make connections with analysts and scholars in the region, we are still touched when we realise the level of presence psychoanalytic ideas have in discourse, be it in terms of public health, debates on race or in the political sphere at large. 

Between May 29 and June 1, Raluca Soreanu and Julianna Pusztai will take part in the ISFN conference held in São Paulo, Brazil, on the theme ‘Psychoanalysis between Catastrophe and Creation: Emerging Perspectives’, and they will present their papers to an international audience. 

The FREEPSY research collective is thrilled to announce that we are going to be part of the Association for Psychosocial Studies (APS) and Association for Psychoanalysis Culture and Society (APCS) 2024 Joint Conference, happening on the 17th and 18th of June, 2024, at St Mary’s University Twickenham, in London, UK. 

The field of Psychosocial Studies expanded in the UK over the 2000s and is now an established field of enquiry that combines various disciplines from the humanities, social sciences, arts, philosophy, feminism and decolonial studies, critical theories and, chiefly, psychoanalysis. We now count with important journals, research hubs, publications and, most of all, with a vibrant international community of scholars and practitioners.  An occasion such as the APS & APCS joint conference is an important opportunity to celebrate the creative rigour of our field, exchanging ideas and consolidating connections.