Lecture on „Infrastructural Thinking and Free Psychoanalytic Clinic“ with Raluca Soreanu

  • Date: 5th February 2026, 7 pm (online, lecture in English)
  • Moderation: Esther Hutfless
  • Registration directly at figurationsoftheunconscious@gmail.com or via the registration form below. The Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.

Registration Form


About the Lecture

In this talk, I examine institutional struggles and forms of innovation in psychoanalytic free clinics, situating them within broader debates on the boundaries of psychoanalysis, money and fees, and the practice of psychoanalysis under conditions of oppression and political unfreedom. I juxtapose two different places and historical contexts.

I first discuss the Budapest Polyclinic in the 1930s, one of the earliest free psychoanalytic clinics. Drawing on archival material and contemporary press coverage, I trace its emergence as well as its struggle for survival during the rise of fascism. I then turn to the first free clinic in Brazil, the Clínica Social do Rio de Janeiro, founded by Hélio Pellegrino in collaboration with Katrin Kemper in the early 1970s, at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship. This experimental clinic sought to rethink the social bond and to question the limits of psychoanalysis as practiced within mainstream training societies.

By comparing the strategies of these collectives, I develop the concept of infrastructural thinking and show how the clinics in Budapest and Rio engaged with overlapping crises. I conclude by reflecting on questions of resilience and infrastructural invention.

About the Lecturer

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 book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis will be published by Routledge in 2026. She is the project lead of the interdisciplinary research project FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant); 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. She is also the Editor of the Journal of the Balint Society.