FCP Speaker Series: The Urge Toward Unity: On the Origins of Community Psychoanalysis

Join us at FCP for a hybrid, illustrated public lecture with Elizabeth Danto, PhD, exploring the origins of community psychoanalysis and Europe’s free psychoanalytic clinics.

This page is for in-person registration at the FCP Library in Downtown Brooklyn. The lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

If you would rather join by Zoom, please register through the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud’s 1918 writing on access to psychoanalytic treatment, emphasizing that “such treatment shall be free,” presents a different and often neglected picture of psychoanalytic theory and its history. This illustrated account of Europe’s free psychoanalytic clinics draws on archival and oral history research to show that psychoanalysis was a modernist movement, as progressive as the era’s music and architecture. After Freud outlined the social obligations of psychoanalysis, free clinics emerged throughout Europe, putting an intellectual tradition of human liberation into practice. These community clinics pioneered treatment and training methodologies that are still used, and still debated, today. Their innovations arose from the ideas of a more political, less well-known Freud whose engagement with Social Democracy places psychoanalysis within the broader history of social reform.

Elizabeth Ann Danto, PhD, is Professor of Social Welfare Emeritus at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is an international lecturer, curator, researcher, and writer. Her books include the prize-winning Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938, Historical Research, Freud/Tiffany, and Theory Has Its Pleasures: The Work of Anna Freud.

This event will be recorded. No continuing education credits will be offered.

Presented through FCP’s Speaker Series and Fridays @ CCP Lecture Series.