Case by Case: Psychoanalysis and the Political Discourse | Book Launch with Patricia Gherovici & Jamieson Webster

This event is part of the Free Clinics Festival organised by the FREEPSY Collective: https://freepsyproject.com/fcf/

Freud’s ‘talking cure’ and its offshoots are more widespread today than ever. But as the divisive issues of our time grow more urgent, a contentious question persists: must psychoanalysis remove itself from politics altogether in order to be effective? Or is it inherently political? Specific disagreements about how clinicians should or shouldn’t engage with imperialism, violence, race, and gender identity point to the broader question of where politics is situated in our psychic life. Is it on the periphery – a symptom or displacement – or right at the heart of the matter?

In this timely book, psychoanalysts Patricia Gherovici and Jamieson Webster examine the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and politics through a sequence of case studies, exploring the many ways in which the political enters the consulting room. Ranging from early cases confronting homosexuality and race to idiosyncratic analyses disentangling the legacies of state and colonial violence, the authors illuminate how the political shapes our relationships to power, normativity, and identity. These historic cases are prescient of the political dilemmas confronting us today. Rather than dismissing psychoanalysis as irrelevant or reducing it to a vehicle for political positions, Case by Case makes a galvanizing and challenging argument for what psychoanalysis can reveal about our political selves – and how it might transform them.

Speakers:

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of On Breathing (2025), Disorganization & Sex (2022), Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018), and, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013). She teaches at the New School for Social Research.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (2010), Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (2017), and Bodies to Wear (2025).

Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK. Her new book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis was published by Routledge in April 2026 in the Relational Perspectives Series. She is the project lead of the FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant).

Solidarity Ticket – £26.94

Standard Ticket – £16.40

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The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.

The event will be held on the first floor of the Museum during regular opening hours. Unfortunately the Freud Museum does not have step-free access at this time. Advance booking is highly recommended as capacity is limited.