Many concepts in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice have emerged during times of crisis as an attempt to understand or address the consequences of two world wars. Psychoanalytic clinics had to invent techniques to treat patients suffering from shell shock, PTSD and loss, as well as psychoanalytic methods of treating patients in hospital settings (Oury, Tosquelles in Psychotherapy and Materialism, 2024). Recent historiographies of psychoanalysis also highlight the significant influence of broader political and social conditions on the formation of psychoanalytic vocabulary, even when psychoanalysts themselves were not directly involved in political activities. To name a few, the concepts of the death drive (Rose, 2020), security (Zeavin, 2024), and reparation (Laubender, 2024).

This paper explores how the free clinics movement redefined the psychoanalytic frame in response to institutional, colonial, and patriarchal crises across different historical and geographical contexts.

The climate catastrophe, current genocides and an overall necropolitical turn in various regions challenge us with an encounter with time. In the clinic we meet a reality of a crisis that is not in the past, rather, of a present-future-impossible. It is already happening; it is still happening; it will continue to happen and even; it is likely to get worst.

Psychoanalysis has been guided by the past, from traumatic blueprints to a point de capiton, we are, seemingly, repeating and, the possible horizons for working through or even ‘healing’ entail being situated differently in relation to the past. In this presentation, I draw on post-human feminist interventions on space and time, specifically, Rosi Braidotti’s work, to elaborate a psychosocial clinic of the ongoing catastrophe. Along ecofeminist thinkers, we will discuss possible modes of collectivity from the perspective of a creative drive to care.

In this presentation, the members of the FREEPSY collective talk to their audience about a recent experience of constructing and mobilising a global Free Clinics Network, made up by over two hundred autonomous psychoanalytic collectives around the world offering free psychoanalysis. This network construction exercise happened in the context of a very rich last decade in the horizon of free clinics. In this decade, free psychoanalytic collectives around the world have pluralised and intensified their practices: they enlarged their access, they started relating to other emancipatory movements, and began to relate to one another. In short, they started behaving as a new social movement. They also theorised and practiced new ecologies, reconfiguring the relationship between mind, nature and society. They were influenced by non-Western and indigenous cosmologies. They acted in a situated manner that starts from the territories and communities in which they operate.

In our times, a re-arrangement of the relationships between mind, nature and society is bound up with our own survival. 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, and which shifts the focus from symptoms and their treatment, to creating a frame and method to rethink race, class, gender, and coloniality. Following closely the work of free clinics around the world, we ask what happens when we imagine an ecology that starts from suffering.

We invite the audience to free-associate with some creative visualisations of the Free Clinics Network. Our goal is to jointly create images and stories about a psychoanalysis-to-come, fit for a time of catastrophe, but also of renewed togetherness. We ultimately treat the Free Clinics Network as an ecology in itself, and we inquire how it can become further enlivened.

What role does psychoanalysis hold when war, political conflict, and interpersonal violence dominate the world? Understanding politics is a disruptive activity focused on the performative enactment of equality by opening spaces (Dikeç, 2012) to expand bodies, objects, and practices. Like an 'elastic band' (Ferenczi, 1928), political and social disasters have always stretched psychoanalysis beyond what was known as possible; we have seen the evolution of radical psychoanalysis, which holds space for collective suffering. Spatial openings of mutual solidarity become 'a relation forged through political struggle [and] seeks to challenge forms of oppression' (Featherstone, 2012).

Engaging with the revived interest in free clinics and a global renewal of radical grassroots movements within psychoanalysis, we encounter the transformative potential of reworking psychoanalysis, challenging dominant theories, and examining societal inequalities relating to gender, sex, class, and race. At the corners of politics and psychoanalysis, we find multiple international groups self-forming, revealing 'political solidarity' (Montany, 2013). In the space of catastrophes, we witness psychoanalysis both shrinking and stretching. How far can psychoanalysis be stretched?

Trauma and hope in war and post-war times are experiences that have marked, and continue to mark, numerous lives in recent history. How is psychoanalysis to respond to this and how has it already done so, historically? This paper invites us to think together with a virtually forgotten Hungarian psychoanalyst Edith Gyömrői and a psychoanalytically oriented educator Nelly Wolffheim – whose own psychoanalytic education happened thanks to the existence of the Berlin Policlinic, the first free clinic of the interwar period – about the ways in which communities and close-knit relationships can help to heal those whose early lives were characterised by trauma, persecution, displacement, material and emotional deprivation. Themselves subject to childhood trauma, war, exile, material insecurity, loss and illness, it is unsurprising that both Gyömrői and Wolffheim developed an interest in how deprivation and abuse of the worst kind can affect childhood development and the best ways of helping such children. In their psychoanalytic studies of children who had survived concentration camps, Wolffheim and Gyömrői relied, to an extent, on the findings of Anna Freud, Bowlby and Winnicott. However, Wolffheim and Gyömrői also stressed the role of a collective identity – either in terms of those who had survived trauma together or of a healing community that is established later – as what can hold a subject together in times of crisis and rehabilitate their desire for life and resistance. This is in marked contrast to the stress on the stable and separated ego that is usually ascribed to some of the analysts mentioned earlier, although this is also a perception that has become established in history. Gyömrői’s and Wolffheim’s theories will also be compared to those of several psychoanalytically informed therapeutic communities, established in the UK in the 1930s and the 1960s.