Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times

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FREEPSY will produce a new global figuration of psychoanalysis as a progressive discourse and practice, by tracing the little-known histories of free psychoanalytic clinics. This interdisciplinary project draws on psychosocial studies, social theory, historical research and arts methods. It asks how collectives of clinicians invested in the social mission of psychoanalysis innovate in the clinical and institutional domain, and in mental health cultures, by reconfiguring the meaning of time, space, money, suffering and their interrelations. In 1918, Freud placed the free clinic at the heart of psychoanalytic thought and practice. The recent progressive histories of psychoanalysis and the contemporary forms of creativity of the free clinics remain unacknowledged. The project breaks ground by telling an alternative radical history of psychoanalysis. It traces the metamorphoses of Freud's couch, happening when psychoanalysis becomes entangled with emancipatory movements and liberation struggles, and engages with social inequalities based on race, class, gender, poverty, and other forms of marginalization. FREEPSY's research programme has four dimensions.Theoretically, FREEPSY rethinks collective creativity, illuminating a novel kind of 'clinical ecology', which impacts how societies suffer, mourn, and become capable of reparation. Historically, FREEPSY shifts the terms of debate in the historiography of psychoanalysis, by telling collective and marginal histories, as opposed to individual and Western-centric histories. Methodologically, FREEPSY innovates by combining (1) a multi-sited psychosocial ethnography of free clinics (in seven main sites: Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, London, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires); (2) an 'archive of the present' assembled through visual arts methods; (3) the construction of a physical and digital archive of free clinics. Ethically, FREEPSY breaks new ground in debates on social justice and cultures of care.