Practicing Psychoanalysis Otherwise: Free Clinics Past, Present and Future

In this piece, we consider the practice of psychoanalysis ‘otherwise’ through the legacies and lessons of free clinics. Here, we challenge the ‘straight line’ of an institutionalised, exclusive historiography, arguing that prohibitive fees have enclosed psychoanalysis within bourgeois quarters – yet, this is not the whole story. Against a backdrop of biomedical dominance, we assert the renewed relevance of psychotherapeutic approaches that work with singularity, and the dynamic unconscious as a guarantor of creativity and liveable future. Our research collective, FREEPSY, investigates free clinics as fundamental experiments of political implication. We identify an ‘infrastructural turn’ in psy-practice, where clinics operate as micro-economies that reinvent rules on value, setting and the social bond. Through radical listening and a creative relationship to the institution, these collectives de-individualise care. We conceptualise this as a ‘mental health commons’, positioning mental health under a biopsychosocial matrix that is not individualising, but is a micropolitical matter of social (re)production. The ‘free’ in free clinic becomes an exclamation—a call to action and a collective interpellation for practising otherwise. We argue for a new relevance of psychoanalysis in catastrophic times by opening space for that which does not fit, and honouring the unconscious.