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.
Continue reading “FREEPSY SYMPOSIUM at the ‘Hope and Despair: Crisis and Opportunity’ Annual Conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies (APS) 9-10 June 2025, St Mary’s University”The Hollós Project: Sound Art Intervention on Madness and Society is Now Publicly Available
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.
FREEPSY Creative Panel: Multi-tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum
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).
Continue reading “FREEPSY Creative Panel: Multi-tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum”Free Clinics Network, call for “Video Letters”
At FREEPSY, we are building a Free Clinics Network (FCN), made up of autonomous clinical collectives worldwide offering free or low-cost psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapy to marginal individuals and populations, while also rethinking the socio-political dimension of mental health.
The FCN aims to map free or low-cost psychoanalytic collectives and promote shared practices among clinicians to widen access to psychoanalytic treatment. We envision the FCN network as a co-built space where collectives, institutions, and clinics can collaborate. This space will foster listening, learning, and practice exchange, recognising patients and analysts as co-creators of a context of care.
If you are involved in a free psychoanalytic clinic, we’d love to hear from you!
Continue reading “Free Clinics Network, call for “Video Letters””London Conference in Critical Thought. 20th/21st June 2025. Call for Papers, deadline April 4th 2025
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.
Continue reading “London Conference in Critical Thought. 20th/21st June 2025. Call for Papers, deadline April 4th 2025”Free Clinics Working Group #3 Germany edition by Ana Tomčić
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.
Continue reading “Free Clinics Working Group #3 Germany edition by Ana Tomčić”The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Trauma and Splitting, with Sándor Ferenczi, Keynote Talk by Raluca Soreanu at the Guild of Psychotherapists
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
‘On the Mental Health Commons: Brazilian Free Psychoanalytic Clinics and an Ethics of Togetherness’ by Ana Minozzo & Raluca Soreanu
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.
Raluca Soreanu is awarded an Impact Accelerator Fund by the University of Essex to consolidate the Free Clinics Network
The IAF project is titled ‘The Free Clinics Network: A Global Network for a Social Movement in the Making’ (January – June 2025)
This award is underpinned by substantive research of the FREEPSY collective.
Continue reading “Raluca Soreanu is awarded an Impact Accelerator Fund by the University of Essex to consolidate the Free Clinics Network”Launching the ‘Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis’ Series at 1968 Press
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?
Continue reading “Launching the ‘Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis’ Series at 1968 Press”