Freud’s 1918 call for free psychoanalytic clinics—where treatment was not reserved for the paying few—has been largely written out of the discipline’s history, and this project aims to put it back in. The problem is that psychoanalysis is widely remembered as an elite, individual, Western-centric practice. FREEPSY argues that this erases a radical alternative: a network of free clinics in cities from Budapest to Buenos Aires, where clinicians adapted psychoanalysis to serve poor, marginalised, and racially oppressed communities. By recovering these forgotten histories, the project fills a gap in both mental health historiography and contemporary debates about accessible care. If successful, the research could reshape how mental health services are designed today. The idea of a “clinical ecology”—where time, space, and money are reconfigured to meet collective needs—offers a concrete model for low-cost, community-based mental health provision. This is not a clinical trial or a new therapy; it is fundamental historical and social research. But by showing that psychoanalysis once had a progressive, public-facing mission, FREEPSY could inform how modern health systems think about equity, access, and the social dimensions of suffering.
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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.
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