Free Clinics: The Past and the Future of Psychoanalysis

How do free psychoanalytic clinics question and expand the horizons of what psychoanalysis can be and who it is meant for? This conference is dedicated both to the legacies of historic free clinics and to contemporary work done by free psychoanalytic clinics around the world. We start from the premise that psychoanalysis needs to be placed in the context of political movements, of feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial politics, and in the context of class struggle.

We invite psychoanalysts, psychosocial researchers, historians, patients, activists, artists, and anyone else interested in the history of free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics to join us in thinking together about the horizons of what psychoanalysis has been and what it could become.

The conference is organised across six different strands or ‘spaces’ plus a Living Conference Space, detailed below, and is designed to give voice especially to collectives who have not yet been present in FREEPSY events, or to themes and angles that have not yet been discussed.

SPACE 1: CLINICAL CULTURES & PRACTICES

SPACE 2: LIBERATORY PRAXIS

SPACE 3: STORIES FROM THE FREE CLINICS

SPACE 4: HISTORIES OF FREE CLINICS

SPACE 5: THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

SPACE 6: SPACE OTHERWISE

LIVING CONFERENCE SPACE (see below)

We received an enormous response to our call out, and have invited presenters to contribute either to the six live conference strands, or to the Living Conference Space, a conference archive. In this way, everyone who had the desire to speak and share ideas in this forum has had the opportunity to do so. The Living Conference Space offerings will be available online before the conference, and will form part of the dialogue at the conference.

The full programme is available here.

An outline programme is included below in the "Agenda" section - cllick on 'See full agenda' to see the agenda and speakers for each day.

The conference is free of charge for online participants although donations are invited.

There is a tiered registration fee for in-person attendees, with a limited number of bursary tickets for the full conference for anyone who would not be able to attend without financial support. If you require a bursary ticket, please email [email protected].

We hope that as many people as possible will join us for all three days, to allow for deep and continuing conversations. Tickets for the full 3 days are available by selecting '4th December' and then the relevant tier Full 3-day Conference ticket. A small number of tickets is available for individual days by clicking on 4th, 5th and 6th December in the ticketing menu and then seleecting the relevant tier 'Single Day Only' ticket.

All income from the conference will be donated to the Maytree, a psychoanalytically-influenced free clinic in London whose vision is 'to fill a gap in services for the acutely suicidal between emergency services and all non-residential help, offering brief-stay crisis support by engaging with non-medical compassionate befrienders' www.maytree.org.uk

(Please also see the FAQs below)

Lunch is provided on each day, with vegetarian options, as well as two coffee breaks.

In our events at FREEPSY, we have experimented with multilingual conversations. We will be using human and automatic translation options to sustain our exchanges.

This conference is part of the FREEPSY Free Clinics Festival November 16th – December 6th 2026, London. Please check the FREEPSY website for other events of the festival, which include workshops, talks, mutual interviews, book launches, archive conversations and art exhibitions, held in several locations in London, including The Freud Museum.

This conference is the third international conference on free psychoanalytic clinics, and sees itself as continuing the first two, organised by Joanna Ryan, Raluca Soreanu and Ivan Ward in 2021 (Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis. Part 1: Sites and Innovations, 16-17 January 2021; and Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis. Part 2: Diversity of Practices, 24-25 July 2021)

Info: 1. Salim Maclean: Witnessing the Failures of the State: Therapeutic Interventions in Public Inquiries
2. Ayushi Madan & Aastha Pal (The Psychodynamic Spectrum): Traversing Psychoanalysis: Institutional Transmission and Access of Language
3. Maytree: The Maytree Model: Clinical & Theoretical Implications

Info: 1. Adriana Herz Domingues, Barbara Chiavegatti, Gefferson Eusébio de Macedo
Junior, Isadora Nascimento, Karina Oliveira Martins & Tereza Kikuch: Grupo Plataforma: Transformation in Latin American Psychoanalysis
2. Bruno Colantoni: El Lanús: Free Psychoanalytic Practice in a Public Hospital, Before, During, and After Dictatorship
3. Fanny Guglielmucci & Monica Luci: From the he Workers' Clinic to the University Beyond Its Walls: Reclaiming Italy's Tradition of Psychoanalysis as a Public Good

Info: 1. Chipo Mukoki, Laureen Rufaro Aigbe & Sharon Jennings: What Happens When Black Women Refuse Freud's Couch? Anger as a Decolonial Feminist Critique of Psychoanalysis
2. Erin Lynch: Territorial Listening: Can an Uprising Become an Analytic Setting? (5-minute documentary and discussion)

Info: 1. Raul Araujo (Favela de Psicanálise): Favela of Psychoanalysis: Territory, Resistance, and the Transmission of Psychoanalysis
2. Greta Kaluževičiūtė: What Does 'Free' Mean After Socialism? Psychoanalysis, Accessibility, and Therapeutic Culture in Lithuania
3. Nathan Leach (NYC Free Clinic): Clinical Encounters of the Political Kind

Info: 1. Red Therapy Collective: The Free Clinic Revisited: Fantasy, Group Life and Political Organisation
2. Natasha Helsinger, Bruno Siniscalchi & Luciano Dias (IEC Instituto de Estudos da Complexidade): Tornar-se herdeiro da psicanálise: raça, expropriação e o futuro da psicanálise
3. Lara Ghiorzi: Escutando infraestruturas: contribuições do SUS para perspectivar a psicanálise

Info: 1. Deepti Sachdev: Hate in the Free Clinic: Countertransference at the Margins
2. Abu Umair (Hausla Health Initiative): What the Frame Cannot Hold: Psychoanalytic Listening in a Delhi Shelter
3. Paula Orchiucci Miura & Ana Letícia Rios Castro Alves: Expanded Clinic with Early Childhood Education Professionals

Info: A chance for the members of the Free Clinics Network to informally discuss future plans for the network over lunch. More details at https://freepsyproject.com/free-clinics-network/

Info: 1. Anderson Carlos Santos de Abreu: From the Origins of Psychoanalysis: Memory and the Formation of a Social and Political Bond of Clinical Practice
2. Jade Forrest Marks: A Crumbling Universe: American Psychoanalysis After the Free Clinic
3. Maria Cristina Poli: The Brazilian Invention of Psychoanalysis: Art and Clinical Experience

Info: 1. Sal Daña (NYC Free Clinic): The Money Wound
2. Flo Toch: Leftist Lacunae: Movement-Building Under Fossil Fascism
3. Roberto Calazans: Gbalá: Psicanálise do racismo e políticas públicas

Info: 1. Akshata Chonkar: The Empathic Therapeutic Relationship and the Caste Unconscious in India
2. Izzy Clifford (Lambeth Mutual Aid): Answering Lara’s Call: The Free Group, Psychic Militancy, and Psychoanalysis in Community
3. Beatriz Barbosa Fejgelman & Mayara Machado Bichir: Rede DIVAM: Toward a Feminist Ethics of Psychoanalytic Clinical Practice

Info: 1. Gustavo Machado & Luca Reitz: Queer Diaspora and Counter-listening: Reconfiguring Psychosocial Listening beyond Regimes of Recognition
2. Harriet Mossop: (Multi)-voicing a Patient’s Perspective of Psychotherapy through a Queer Fable: The Silver Fox and the Crow
3. Sepideh Shirani: Inoutside

Info: 1. Xiaomeng Qiao: How Psychoanalysis Grows Outside the Clinic
2. Rachel Alice: From Neutrality to Withness: Reimagining Psychoanalytic Responsibility in Times of Polycrisis

Info: 1. Lee Slome & Francisco González (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco): Future-Possibility: The Core Seminar Model of Psychoanalytic Training
2. Tracy Simon (Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis): The Impossibility of the Institution and the Question of the Group
3. Eugenia Campanella (Brigata Basaglia): ‘Radicality Means Going to the Root of Things’ – Psychoanalysis within Social Movements

Event venue & nearby stays

Lift, 45 White Lion Street, London, United Kingdom

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