Inhabiting the Systems We Create, Creating the Symptoms We Treat

In this presentation, we will discuss how psychoanalytic discourses have historically reduced relational, social, and institutional experiences to individual, pathological experiences. Charla R. Malamed will guide us through a constellation of vignettes from clinical and non-clinical domains, illustrated by lived experiences that are testament to how attempts to separate the political and the personal further clarify that the personal is political. As well as drawing on their experience to illuminate the possibility of the co-emergence of personal healing with collective liberation.

We will consider how relational praxis is one step on the path to full-systems praxis. Participants aren’t simply individuals; partners in the therapeutic encounter aren’t simply dyads; unconscious relations are not simply dyadic enactments. Rather, all is embedded and inherently systemic. The personal is collective, the dyadic is a matrix, enactments are systemic.In doing this, we are invited to join Charla as they perform the rejection of a “symptom picture” – a coming apart – and the assertion of an emergent cohering of a socio-historically embedded subjectivity – a coming together.

Hosted by The Red Clinic. We come together with Beatriz Santos, Ednei Soares, and Ana Minozzo.

Charla Ruby Malamed (they/them) is a clinician working and living on Abenaki land in New Hampshire USA. They graduated from the School for Social Work at Smith College and the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School. They currently work at a boarding high school, as well as holding a small private practice for adults and couples. Their professional interests include queer and trans-feminist theory; the inseparability of “politics” from intra-psychic and relational dynamics; and the co-facilitation of spaces for community-building and solidarity. They have published in the areas of Whiteness in clinical work, antiracism in analytic institutions, and gender play. They serve on the Board of Section 9, Psychoanalysis for Social Justice, Division 39.

Beatriz Santos is a clinical psychologist and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies at the Institute of Humanities, Sciences, and Society at the University of Paris. Her research focuses on the connections between gender studies and psychoanalysis and includes the co-editing of “Dis donc, d’où tu parles ?” Savoirs situés: Enjeux et Méthodes (2024) and Pulsion de mort: Destruction et créations (2023), both published by Hermann.

Ednei Soares is a Brazilian psychoanalyst trained at a Lacanian school with 19 years of experience in Europe and South America. For his PhD, he explored how Freud’s thinking on fetishism allows for non-pathologizing perspectives in contemporary sexuality and gender identity, including trans sexuality. Since 2023, he is a researcher for the Stichting Psychoanalytische Fondsen of The Dutch Psychoanalytic Association together with Radboud University, the Netherlands. Ednei Soares also currently works at the ARQ Centrum’45 National Psychotrauma Centrum as a psychotherapist for LGBTQ refugees victims of persecution, exclusion or (sexual) violence because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.

Ana Minozzo is a clinician and researcher based in London, UK. She holds a PhD and an MA in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck, University of London and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Psychosocial Studies within FREEPSY, at the University of Essex. She has experience with a number of community-based mental health services and her research crosses the fields of medical humanities, feminist philosophy and psychosocial enquiry. Ana is also part of the Psychosis Therapy Project, and a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, both in London, UK. Her book ‘Anxiety as Vibration: a Psychosocial Cartography’ was published by Palgrave in 2024.

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