In this talk, I look at institutional struggles and forms of innovation happening in psychoanalytic free clinics, which are important for a broader conversation on the boundaries of psychoanalysis, on money and the fee in psychoanalysis, and on the issue of practising psychoanalysis in a time of oppression and political unfreedom. I capture two different places and historical contexts in juxtaposition. I first discuss the Budapest Polyclinic in the 1930s, one of the first free clinics of psychoanalysis. Drawing on archival material and on press coverage of the time, I capture the moment of emergence of the Budapest Polyclinic, but also its struggle for survival in a time of upsurge of fascism. I then turn to the traces of the first free clinic in Brazil: Clínica Social do Rio de Janeiro [The Social Clinic in Rio de Janeiro], created by Hélio Pellegrino, in collaboration with Katrin Kemper. Clínica Social do Rio de Janeiro was an experimental clinic, set up at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, in the early 1970s. The clinic was invested in rethinking the social bond at large, as well as questioning the limitations of psychoanalysis as practiced within mainstream training societies and stretching psychoanalytic work beyond these limitations. The ‘soft devices’ these collectives created reconfigured the psychoanalytic frame in ways that are relevant for our contemporary conversations on free clinics. Comparing their strategies, I theorise ‘infrastructural thinking’ and I show how the clinics in Budapest and Rio de Janeiro engaged in this type of thinking. I look at the concentric crises that psychoanalysis was bound to operate in and I ask questions about resilience and infrastructural invention.

Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinker and writer. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and the co-author, with Jenny Willner and Jakob Staberg of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). Her new book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis will be published by Routledge in April 2026 in the Relational Psychoanalysis Series. She is the project lead of the FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant), an interdisciplinary collective of ten researchers studying the histories and legacies of free psychoanalytic clinics around the world. She is Academic Associate of The Freud Museum London; and Editor of the Studies in the Psychosocial series at Palgrave and of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis Series at 1968 Press.