Psychoanalysis for the People: Interrogations and Innovations

Abstract

In this introduction, the editors outline the aim of the Free Clinics special issue: that of articulating a new vocabulary in psychoanalysis, which can reflect its dimensions of critical and progressive discourse and practice, while tracing the little-known histories of free psychoanalytic clinics. Through this special issue, new questions become possible about what it means to socialise and collectivise the practices that inscribe the social vocation of psychoanalysis. The issue focuses on collectives of clinicians invested in a socially minded psychoanalysis and on their innovations in clinical and institutional domains. An important question that the editors ask is: what resources does psychoanalysis hold in our times for grounding alternative forms of care? The editors also reflect on the ethics of social articulation and on the format that new inscriptions can take in psychoanalysis. The acts of communicating the projects presented in this special issue are necessarily heterogeneous, inflected in a multitude of ways depending on who the speakers are and where they are situated.