Inside the third floor’s exhibition galleries, the works of young Brazilian artists focus on the ways in which representations of their experiences of colonialism overlap with the desire to maintain or resurrect indigenous art-making. Along the perimeter of the exhibition space and in adjoining rooms, as if looking over the community it anchors, the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls support and contain its center for art and psychoanalysis, São Paulo’s Favela de Psycanálise.

The Favela de Psycanálise was developed several years ago, in the neighborhood of São Miguel Paulista, on the eastern rim of the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Aiming to democratize psychoanalysis, the founders created a teaching/learning space where the arts co-exist with psychoanalytic training and where clinical treatment is accessible to Brazilian citizens. While the field of psychoanalysis, born in Vienna with Sigmund Freud, is perpetually recreated in view of the cultural particularities of each place where it settles, Brazilian psychoanalysis is as multi-cultural as the country itself. From its late 1920s beginning with the São Paulo Society of Psychoanalysis, through the modernist movement which infused Brazilian art and literature with Freudian ideas; from the universities where the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and sociology established critical dialogues with psychoanalysis, through the arrival of Argentine psychoanalysts escaping the military regime, Brazilian psychoanalysis has weathered the contradiction between institutional urbanism and the “open skies” of possibility.[1]

Despite the genuine cultural popularity of psychoanalysis, economic and social impediments to psychoanalytic treatment place it outside the practicable reach of most Brazilians. The Favela de Psycanálise started with this idea. On the one hand, psychoanalysis is so ingrained in Brazilian society, that it is now officially included in the curriculum of all psychology courses. On the other hand, psychoanalytic treatment and training remain restricted to affluent Brazilians living in the wealthiest areas of the cities. While psychoanalytic societies, schools, and forums of various theoretical orientations have materialized across the country, actual treatment access remains restricted to an affluent minority. Sessions are expensive, their cost far exceeding the minimum wage in a country where 90% of the population earns a monthly income below $620, and at least 70% hold two minimum wage jobs at the same time. Half the population lacks basic sanitation, and at least 20% live in sub-par housing. Meanwhile psychoanalytic training is even more exclusive than treatment as the institutes generally require at least a university education, personal analysis (often with a training analyst), supervision, and completion of theoretical seminars. In other words, favela residents are excluded from both treatment and training even though it could greatly benefit themselves and their communities.

If “community” is synonymous with “favela,” so too “community psychoanalysis” is a natural component of this polity. This lyrical word, “favela,” can be broadly interpreted, denoting the concrete image of a bright white and green plant (Cnidoscolus Phyllacanthus, Martius) as much as an entire way of life. The term itself holds tracings of colonization and its trajectory, slavery, the Proclamation of the Republic, industrialization, globalization, and neoliberalism –echoes of uprooting, resistance, and re-rooting. Drawing on these multiple meanings, the early 20th Century writer Euclides da Cunha’s classic “Rebellion in the Backlands” (Os Sertões) describes how the image of the flowering favela plant gave its name to the Bahian hill where federal troops camped during the War of Canudos (1896–1897). There, the preacher Antônio Conselheiro founded a self-sufficient community of about 25,000 poor inhabitants (sertanejos). Following the destruction of Canudos, the war’s veterans, mostly poor men and former slaves, occupied the Morro da Providência neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, and renamed it the Morro da Favela. From then on, the term "favela" began to signify popular communities and housing. Industrial- ization brought rapid urbanization –and poor planning. With 80% of Brazil’s population living in cities, the favela became the primary form of housing for poor people and migrants. What started in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo spread throughout the country and the Global South, becoming the worldwide mode of living for disenfranchised groups.[2] In the neoliberal environment, housing that was once considered "subnormal" has become the norm, and the favela has come to signify a global class-based Other. Drawing on this perspective, the British economist Peter Lloyd-Sherlock concluded, “housing policy had become more concerned with popular perceptions [and] the prospects for any real improvements to conditions in the favelas and their disappearance are exceedingly bleak.”[3]

Fortunately, the favela has a radically different story to tell. In 2022, in the waning of the Covid pandemic, a group of psychoanalysts from São Paulo adopted the term Favela to represent their goal of expanded access to clinical care and training. For them, the project name of "Favela de Psycanálise” evoked both the “flowering of psychoanalysis” and the “community of psychoanalysis.” Raul Araújo spearheaded the venture. “I studied psychology, and I always had a practice with children and adolescents living on the streets, and with incarcerated men and women,” he said. “I missed a place to discuss and think about psychoanalysis beyond the bubble of wealth.” Araújo aimed to move outside the elitist narrative surrounding mental health treatment, and stay responsive to the urban multiplicity and diversity of marginalized groups. His goal was to design a pluralistic and democratic curriculum. Questions of hunger, exile, displacement and violence would not be ignored. In fact, the concerns of low-income and even extremely poor individuals would be privileged above those of higher-income groups. The new training “is neither individual nor institutional,” insisted Araújo, “but a collective training space for the working class analyst to assist the working class.”

Within this collective, psychoanalysts highlight titles by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Sigmund Freud, and Donald Winnicott to galvanize ongoing debates and to sustain the Favela’s genre of training and treatment. Seminar themes are proposed by the trainers, and vary from harm reduction and the law to racism, migration, discrimination, abuse, exile, and subjectivity. “It is possible to be indignant about situations but also draw on that discontent to build a platform based on human rights. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy gives us that footprint,” Araújo says. But Sigmund Freud holds a special place in their mission, and his 1918 speech on the “conscience of society” is, in its own way, a foundational document for the Favela de Psycanálise. A specific passage in Freud’s speech to the 5th International Psychoanalytic Congress is widely credited for its influence: “It is possible to foresee that the conscience of society will awake and remind it that the poor man should have just as much right to assistance for his mind as he now has to the life-saving help offered by surgery,” Freud wrote. “Then institutions and out-patient clinics will be started […] Such treatments will be free […] Probably these institutions will be started by private charity. Some time or other, however, it must come to this […].”[4]

Over one hundred years ago, Freud asked his analytic colleagues to visualize a public future for psychoanalysis: a treatment reaching beyond the individual diagnosis of neurosis, a patient pool drawn from multiple cultures, a physical space that could be open without precluding confidential clinical discourse. With social exchange in mind, the waiting room of the mid-1920s psychoanalytic clinic offered this experience within a social space. Patients came with a shared purpose but frequently opposite social worlds. As Max Eitingon observed at the Berlin Poliklinik: “Even the circumstance whereby [patients] are not alone in the waiting-room has, in my opinion (and in this I have often been confirmed by my colleagues), a favorable effect; in the crowded waiting-room reality impresses upon the neurotic that he is not the only one to whom the physician is a Father.”[5] The story of psychoanalysis then, unfolds, in part, in community. Regardless of social class, an individual’s process of looking back at an earlier period of their life starts in collective spaces.

Contrary to the conventional narrative about Sigmund Freud, in fact he championed those whom the bourgeoisie cast off as morally undeserving or economically irresponsible –destitute families, lonely and suicidal children, unemployed men, the very populations who would lose access to psychoanalytic treatment were it not a social right. As he said about the Berlin free clinic in 1923: “If psychoanalysis, alongside its scientific significance, has a value as a therapeutic procedure, this help should be available to the great multitude who are too poor themselves to repay an analyst for his time-consuming work.”[6] This was not just an idea –it was a practice. In Vienna of the 1920s and early 1930s, psychoanalysts saw themselves as brokers of social change for whom psychoanalysis was a challenge to traditional political codes, a social mission more than a medical discipline. Or as Anna Freud said: “Back then, we were all so excited –full of energy […] It was as if a whole new continent was being explored. We were the explorers, and we now had the chance to change things.”[7]

One hundred years later, psychoanalysts again had “the chance to change things.” In September 2023, the Favela de Psycanálise furthered its training program by bringing together over thirty young Brazilian clinicians to participate in a course titled “The Ideal Psychoanalytic Clinic.” The title was inspired by Anna Freud’s 1966 paper on The Ideal Psychoanalytic Institute. With the goal of developing innovative models for psychoanalytically-informed community mental health clinics, participants in this 4-unit interactive seminar drew on history, theory, and practice. As Anna Freud wrote, “students [of the Ideal Psychoanalytic Institute are] expected to enter actively into the new field and explore the unfamiliar discipline in a spirit of adventure and discovery [and to be] equally versed in human understanding, clinical insight, therapeutic skill, and searching exploration.”[8] And they were.

Three of Freud’s essays[9] were pre-assigned in order to lend historical meaning to the seminar project. Chosen for their integration of social democracy and psychoanalysis, the essays gave participants the theoretical muscle with which to build a foundation for their own “ideal clinic” designs. In particular, Freud’s ideas on social justice were used to challenge and deconstruct essentialism and/or universalism while, at the same time, respecting a range of individual, group, and cultural identities. In this way, psychoanalysis was located in relation to the 20th Century’s alternately reformist and conformist social movements of modernism, socialism, democracy, and fascism in Brazil and Europe alike. Participants were encouraged to bring in material relevant to their service population and cultural perspective.

The course was held over four days in late September 2023; each day was divided into a morning lecture/discussion, a community lunch, and an afternoon where participants were self-selected into small groups to work on clinic designs. The four morning lectures were delivered in English with simultaneous translations into Portuguese. Each lecture was accompanied by projected visuals. These slides of archival material captured the internal and external atmosphere of the pioneering clinics of the 1920s, and the early development of public practice. Original clinic charts showed, in vivid detail, how analysts from Berlin’s Max Eitingon to Melanie Klein recorded diagnoses, attendance, patient age and gender, and length of treatment. Clips of local newspaper articles, like one from Vienna’s popular liberal daily paper, Die Stunde on “Psychoanalysis for the Destitute,” indicated the surprisingly broad social acceptance of psychological distress. The slides gave participants the sense of “being there,” of joining the movement that started in Europe of the 1920s and was taking hold one hundred years later in Brazil. Weighing idealism against political realities, these seminars allowed young analysts to explore topics such as “access to psychoanalysis as a social right,” a fundamental premise of Freud’s 1918 essay. They also considered Sigmund Freud’s views on social class, the impact of “social context” on psychoanalytic practice, and Anna Freud’s role in the emergence of community psychoanalysis.

How could these classical ideas about the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis be put into practice in a contemporary context, within local communities? After a group lunch at the local farm kitchen run by neighborhood women, the participants returned to the Favela de Psycanálise for an afternoon of discussion and planning. The five small groups were asked to formulate blueprints for their new clinics, and to include: location and service population; outdoor and indoor appearance (surfaces, furnishings, room and corridor design); funding and staff (paid, volunteer, professional, para-professional); treatment modalities (family, group, individual community); the role of the psychoanalyst; an area and two questions for research. But every day before they got to work, the participants shared their feedback with a brief group “check-in”: they experienced the course environment as, among other things, “cozy, curious, relaxed, calm, intriguing, exciting, and friendly.” They aimed to construct a clinical atmosphere that would be “anti-racist, anti-colonial, inclusive, full of hope, accessible, collective, strong, diverse, and equitable.” The kind of certitude needed to build a clinic might present a false front in the battle against colonialism, but “resistance to the heritage of slavery, social action, collective mourning, and the integration of indigenous signs” would legitimate their clinics as places of healing.

No human service program is considered acceptable without an “evaluation component,” as the social scientists call it. Though we aimed to collect reliable information from subjects known to us, our evaluation instrument was indeed un-scientific and un-institutional. We aimed for an open, discursive survey that might show if and how the participants thought psychoanalysis could have a more positive effect on human systems than prevailing narratives suggest. Our respondents came from all over Brazil. They ranged from Claudine[10], a 44-year-old white woman, who works as a service manager with 300 children and adolescents aged 7 to 14, families, and a team of 15 employees; to Mita, who divides her time between an IT company, studying psychoanalysis, and activism in a social movement where she “can fight for the state to recognize ... that public psychoanalysis acts as a reparation for the state's aggressions against individuals”; to Muslim, a doctoral student in psychology who appreciated “the diversity of experiences of my course colleagues and the frank debate between the speaker and the course participants regarding the differing views of the 'ideal' of the ideal clinic”; and more than thirty other young Brazilian women and men with compelling stories about psychoanalytic practice with community in ascendance.

In studying the results of the evaluation, we sought to understand what drove our participants to build a practice of community psychoanalysis, given that no formal template binds this work to, say, individual therapy. We found some common threads in the clinicians’ personal reflections, most notably in the ways they connected experiences of discrimination with a desire for redress. Infuriating childhood events like family eviction or parental unemployment, arising not from “fate” but from the overt racial discrimination and other residues of slavery and colonization, led them to non-individualized forms of empowerment. Ultimately, many participants said that the aim of their clinical work was not to moralize but to help clients balance social action with individual healing by re-establishing social bonds. As Claudine wrote, “Knowledge of psychoanalysis helps me in carrying out the work, understand the territory and its vulnerabilities, and develop possible actions […] I believe that community psychoanalysis has the role of emancipating the subject and strengthening social ties with more collective criticality.”

While inclined to place the favela residents’ various plights in the context of exploitation, which they are, the psychoanalysts generally thought that an ideal clinic should help people balance environmental trauma with the immediacy of individual experience. Camlia, a 28-year old Black psychologist who works in social protection service, explained, “First, I build a detailed service plan with the user, aiming to re-signify the intrusive thoughts that repeat the violence of the internalized situation, to break a traumatizing cycle.” Making mental health services widely available in the community would help, she said, as would “expanding clinic schools and popular clinics where analysts and students could attend those in need while supporting each other.” Meanwhile Camlia’s colleague Gabriel, an academic psychologist who is also a Candomble practitioner, emphasized ecology, and that Brazilian discourse recognizes the deep connections between environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors. As such, efforts to extract commercial value out of natural resources reflect our changing attitudes toward the natural world, which we have long regarded—wrongly, he argues, as separate from, rather than symbiotic with our species.

Several participants disputed the very premise of an “ideal” clinic. Was this a resistance to the idea of expanding treatment boundaries, or yet one more compromise with white Western colonization? “I found the discussions inadequate,” observed Talissa, “because we did not include black psychoanalysts beyond Frantz Fanon. Also, insisting on projecting an ideal clinic becomes very difficult to achieve within the social perspective.” Interestingly though, no one objected to using Freud’s essays as the theoretical groundwork for their projects, and all grasped the connection between psychoanalysis and social justice. Talissa continued: “From the perspective of community psychoanalysis, Mourning and Melancholia makes you think about collective mourning, socially produced melancholias, the discomfort of knowing that some have more than others because of inequitable distribution of wealth. What does the discomfort imposed by capitalism mean to those who experience it as the disposable or killable ones?” Taken together, the evaluations chronicle how the clinicians who staff public Brazil’s social and health services, from the agency to the street, think about their work. Their mission to bring relief to people stripped of autonomy by illness and poverty is undergirded by psychoanalytic theory and the fascinating, at times contradictory, character of community psychoanalysis. This method, wrote Denis, “can contribute to a calming of social and intrapsychic conflicts. Ultimately, psychoanalysis points to a way of overcoming the current social structure that defends narcissistic, authoritarian individuality in favor of individual possibility in a context of social oppression.”

Without conforming to colonizing precarity nor the punishing culture of neoliberalism, the Favela de Psycanálise has been able to weave psychoanalytic theory into its community, helping its residents mold a more comfortable reality. For Denis, as for most of the other participants in our course on “The Ideal Clinic,” the favela represents a kaleidoscope of individual stories, the lives of marginalized people hollowed out by drugs, destitution, racism and, more generally, estrangement from society. But with its new center for the arts and psychoanalysis grounded in social justice, this same favela is now empowered to put this right. “This replacement of the power of the individual by that of a community,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1930, “is the decisive step toward civilization.”[11]

Text exclusively Shared with The CCCA Community

11-18- 2024