This creative panel brings together an interdisciplinary collective working on progressive histories and practices in psychoanalysis. We focus on free psychoanalytic clinics, where therapists offer psychoanalysis to marginalised individuals and groups, while also reconsidering the very pillars of psychoanalytic theories and techniques from a psychosocial ground. Drawing on theoretical, historical, ethnographic and artistic work aimed at producing a new figuration of psychoanalysis as a radical form of care, we ask a series of interrelated questions, centred around the processes of learning and unlearning alive in free clinics.

Together we will consider historical and contemporary accounts of re-invention of psychoanalytic praxes, which unfold from the creativity of clinical work conducted in what we broadly call ‘free clinics’. Marginalised from official psychoanalysis historiography in their own way, they are psychosocial from the get-go: ranging from alternative care space for children in the early 20th century England, to 1930s Europe, to a series of collectives offering psychoanalysis on the streets of Brazil in recent years. A significant part of what sustains these spaces is a disposition to interrogate positions of knowing and not knowing in the field of mental health care, re-politicising an understanding of the unconscious, transference, fantasy, symptoms. A commitment to experimenting with pedagogies of unlearning –unlearning some of the blind spots of psychoanalysis on class, race, gender –gives consistency to the possibilities of inventing something new, including new clinical dispositifs.

A sculpture will be displayed during the panel.

Raluca Soreanu: Free psychoanalytic clinics and infrastructural thinking
Ana Tomcic: Healing communities: Un-disciplining the Social Bond in Work with Anti-Social Adolescents 1930-1970.
Ana Minozzo: Psychoanalysis-in-common: The case of Brazilian Free Clinics
Julianna Pusztai: Radical Openings and Psychoanalytic Movements in the 1970s UK: Circulation of Knowledge
Ana Cvorovic: Translucent Walls
Lizaveta van Munsteren: Learning from free clinics: psychosocial implications for the psychoanalytic clinic