‘Time’ for ‘the People’: Reflections on ‘Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’

Abstract

This article offers some reflections on two important conferences held at the Freud Museum in London during 2021, which has resulted in the publication of a remarkable special issue of Psychoanalysis and History. The conferences aimed at providing a new space to re-engage a long history of debate, started by Freud himself, about psychoanalysis as not only a form of mental health treatment, and a theory of mind, but a social and political project aimed at emancipation. Descriptions of pioneering ‘social clinics’ from São Paulo to south London that maintain psychoanalytic thinking about social suffering, and offer psychoanalysis as a critical analytic tool to understand such suffering, render these projects ‘psychosocial’. The article reflects on the temporal nature of these clinics – their particular uses of time as part of healing, as well as their temporariness that is linked to the precarity of projects that are often underfunded, and rely on the passion and commitment of founders, practitioners and patients. Somehow many of them ‘stagger on’, contributing to the preservation of the social mission of psychoanalysis, started over 100 years ago. The author offers a perspective from the ‘Waiting Times’ research project that investigates the relation between time and care, by turning to Isabelle Stengers’s ‘care of the possible’ as a way to conceptualize the work of these psychoanalytic social clinics.