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.
What drives us? Or where are we being driven towards? In times of climate catastrophe, emboldened fascism and genocides, the psychoanalytic subject comes under scrutiny as we examine its possibilities of relationality. Oftentimes, it is in negativity, aggressivity and conflict that psychoanalytic discourses veer away from flattened-out political discourses that rely, mostly, in conscious moral sutures to imagine conditions of living together. Whilst foundational texts of our discipline rely on separation and alterity as necessary means of individuation, long-standing Feminist, Decolonial and Ecological scholarship are critical in their engagement with the psychoanalytic subject when it comes to its horizons of forms of sustaining liveable life, human and otherwise. Grappling with current crises, their deadliness and tragedy, we wonder if it is all, in the end, just ‘human nature’? Can philosophical enquiry of the psychoanalytic point towards novel entanglements of the question of nature, culture, ‘civilization’ and language? May we find some precious clues also in less canonical, or marginal, minor psychoanalytic texts, and praxes? And who can afford, if anyone, to ignore the necessity of reconfiguring nature, bios, and the promises of symbolic mediation in the 21st century?
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 1st 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
New article published in Critical Times, in a special issue on ‘Solidarity’, authored by Ana Minozzo & Raluca Soreanu, available in Open Access format.
The political history of psychoanalysis is marked by a tension between a widely critiqued reproduction of alienation and the capacity to open radical spaces for rethinking subjectivity and practicing togetherness. This essay’s research focuses on moments when fugitive free clinics are formed, functioning in friction with the psychoanalytic establishment, and centered on deindividualizing and commoning practices in the clinical realm. In this essay, the authors follow free clinics in Brazil, from the 1970s to the present. These are marginal, open-border clinics. Developing a vocabulary to account for what the authors call “the mental health commons,” they attend to scenes of fugitivity, to territorial listening, and to a creative “corruption” of psychoanalysis and its mainstream practices. Ultimately, what emerges is a set of autonomous, emancipatory free clinics, where creativity and the imagination are potent, and social symptoms turn into affective bonds, commonly unleashed.
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.
