Collectives, Commons and Mental Health

The mode of alienation experienced in the infinity of divisions that characterise what Deleuze astutely called ‘societies of control’ resonates in the complex field of mental health, where the rise of categories of diagnoses in the last four decades is met with an increased identification with universalising codes. In such landscape, I propose a study of contemporary free psychoanalytic clinics, which have boomed internationally, and mainly in Latin America, as a site of collectivity where dividuals can not-just-speak, but entangle in common nets of togetherness. This piece draws on current psychosocial ethnographic fieldwork of autonomous free clinics in Brazil to stretch imaginative potentialities in the many forms of collectivity that cross current social, ecological and political troubles. Expanding Oury’s (2005) notion of the ‘collective’, we will think together about horizons of commons beyond abysses of dividuality in the context of free clinics and the fugitive potency in political alliances, as well as in symptomatic productions and creative spaces for their elaboration beyond pre-established codes and onto the poetics of the encounter

Commons · Contemporary philosophy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Mental health · Political science · Psychiatry · Sociology · Law · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Philosophy · Psychology