The University of Essex has secured funding to investigate free psychoanalytic clinics and their 100-year legacy across the globe, to shape services for the future.
This new £1.6 million interdisciplinary project will map little-known histories of free psychoanalytic clinics and ask how clinicians practice the social mission of psychoanalysis and how they innovate in the sphere of mental health. It will seek to inspire a new conversation on social justice and care.
Professor Raluca Soreanu, project lead, said: “I am delighted to have the opportunity to lead on this research programme, because the free clinics of psychoanalysis are laboratories of political experimentation which model different ways of working. Through a close look at their histories and practices, we can illuminate the fact that other economies are possible, other ecologies are possible, and that mental health commons are possible.”
The project will examine the work of psychoanalysts in free and low-cost clinics in very different contexts, from Europe, Latin America and North America, through to the UK National Health Service. The project will create and maintain The Free Clinics Network, aiming to share the progressive histories of psychoanalysis, and to serve as a resource for clinicians and patients globally. The project will also generate The Free Clinics Archive, a lasting resource hosted at the University of Essex.
The five-year project started in October 2022. It was evaluated by the European Research Council and is one of 313 winners of their Consolidator Grants, part of EU’s Horizon Europe programme. It is funded by a UKRI Frontier Research Grant (ERC Consolidator Grant guarantee).
For more information visit: https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2022/08/24/study-into-free-psychoanalytic-clinics.
