Territorial Listening and Psychoanalysis in Critical Social Situations: Constructing Clinical Dispositifs

by Emília Estivalet Broide (Editor), Jorge Broide (Editor)

Territorial Listening is an event. Its authors start from the premise that cities and streets, much like dreams, present us with manifest and latent contents that are expressed in unconscious ways. The psychoanalyst does not listen only to an individual utterance but to the territorial relations in which it is embedded and where its meaning lies. Starting from Brazilian scenes of listening, Emília Estivalet Broide and Jorge Broide–together with their many collaborators, the ‘Rede SUR’ or ‘South Network’–construct an entire vocabulary around territorial listening. They ‘listen everywhere’ in the territory, in an embodied manner: in places where people queue for food, in places where police violence takes place, in playgrounds. By adding the concept dispositif to our everyday psychoanalytic vocabularies, this volume points to the possibility of renovation of the psychoanalytic frame, of play and invention.

This volume is presented with a preface by Susana Caló, Ana Minozzo and Raluca Soreanu and a foreword by Elizabeth Danto.

Inspiring and innovative, Territorial Listening lucidly addresses psychoanalytic work in critical social situations and public clinics. It brings to Anglophone psychoanalysis a new wealth of clinical experiences and theoretical reflections on listening to the unconscious and on multiple transferences in territories of social exclusion. It represents a huge advance in the creative adaptation of psychoanalysis outside the consulting room, with many moving examples of how this is configured and practised. It will provide a rich diversity of clinical and conceptual tools for years to come. It points the way to an enhanced future for psychoanalysis as an ethical practice and radically extends our ideas of what psychoanalysis can do and be.

— Joanna Ryan

Author of Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Theory

296 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2026

Reviews

[Martin Hare Michno]

A timely manifesto for the re-politicisation of psychoanalysis, and the rejection of reactionary, bourgeois 'psy' professions. Ian and David go through four psychoanalytic concepts: the unconcious, repetition, drive and transference. These are not so much taken from the one-to-one clinic to the collective political sphere, as the clinic is already in itself collective and political.

It starts off with a basic and fundamental psychoanalytic fact: the unconcious is structured like language, it is collective, the subject is an ensemble of social relations, the individual is a fiction.

[Stefanos]

Seize the means of ... interpretation?!
The aim of “Psychoanalysis and Revolution” by Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar is twofold:
1) to critique mainstream “adaptive psy” professions and
2) to highlight the radical potential of psychoanalysis to support emancipatory movements both in theory and practice.

1. The authors criticize adaptive psy professions (a) for their tendency to overlook how often it is society that is “sick” and not the individual, (b) reinforcing individualism and separation, a form of dualism between the external environment and the Self, (c) their role in normalizing and adapting individuals into oppressive structures and (d) producing ‘good’ (“functional”, “productive” and obedient) workers and consumers.

For instance, treating depression and anxiety merely as “chemical imbalances” or using CBT to address “dysfunctional thinking patterns and behaviors” often obscures the role of societal factors such as economic insecurity, job dissatisfaction, social isolation, poverty, inequality, lack of access to support systems, the lack community and many other major contributors to mental health. The notion that “if only you’d think differently” or “balance your brain chemistry” will fix the problem serves as a tool to adapt people to reality instead of enabling them to change it. It’s not like drug treatments and “adaptive” psychotherapy are useless or never appropriate (they can even be life-saving in some cases) but they primarily address surface-level symptoms and tend to ignore the underlying root causes. As a result, the symptoms often reemerge or manifest in a different form.

In a sense, I expect the argument to be self-evident to most radicals. What else would be the case? Systems tend to produce individuals who perpetuate and reproduce these systems. Most institutions evolve and are organized to produce, reproduce, and normalize their own existence and support the status quo. Much like the education system or news media, which are primarily designed to produce good workers and consumers — passive, obedient, and uninformed individuals. And surely, if people lacking class consciousness or awareness of other systems of oppression experience negative effects as a result of systemic oppression and encounter mainstream “adaptive psy” professions, they will likely be “adapted” again. But [anecdotal argument alert], I have had numerous friends and comrades suffering from depression, anxiety, drug addiction, or other issues, who went through mainstream psy treatments and, to some extent, benefited from them, without forgetting or ignoring the root causes of their suffering. Once they were better, they returned to their movements and organizations. It seems less likely to me that activists and radicals will be neutralized to the extent of abandoning their struggles by adaptive psychotherapy.

2. There is a long history of both tension and collaboration between psychoanalysis and movements such as Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, and others. Figures like Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon, Juliet Mitchell, and many others come to mind. The authors choose to focus on four key psychoanalytic concepts and their “radical potential”: the unconscious, repetition, drive, and transference.

Unconscious: the ruling ideology structures the unconscious, influencing our desires, fears, and inner conflicts, dictating behavior and our internal sense of self and reality.
The authors caution against two common misconceptions about the unconscious:
– the notion that it is “something deep and dark within us”, connected to our biological nature while psychoanalysis serves to “civilize” it.
– the Jungian idea of the “collective unconscious” as a mystical realm of universal archetypes, which easily leads to problematic concepts like “racial archetypes” where different ethnic groups are thought to have specific ways of thinking, and it is the work of “experts” to identify them.
Instead, the unconscious is seen as “socially and historically produced and reproduced”. It is “the other side of language”. A part of the symbolic order, shaped by social and historical contexts.

Repetition: we unconsciously repeat what we cannot remember because it is too intolerable or traumatic to face directly. We often repeat self-destructive behaviors, i.e. repeatedly choosing toxic romantic partners/friends/allies, overworking to the point of burnout, perpetuating exclusionary or hierarchical practices, or adhering to ineffective strategies in emancipatory movements. Free association provides the opportunity to unmask “the compulsion to repeat” self-destructive patterns and gives an opportunity “to repeat, and fail better”.

Drive: the logic of Capital exploits our ‘vital drive’ and transforms it into a ‘death drive’, manifested in the relentless pursuit of “dead money,” self-destructive work habits, ecological destruction and so on. Critically examining and understanding how our drives are manipulated and exploited, we can re-direct them towards emancipatory and collective goals.

Transference: in the beginning, the Analysand may suppose that the Analyst has special knowledge and insight about them (and thus power over them) but in the process they can realize that they do not. No one does. Including other authority figures, be it parents or “charismatic leaders”. Through transference the Analysand can become aware and re-evaluate internalized hierarchies and illusions of authority, inside and outside the clinic.

So in summary, the authors contend that through psychoanalysis, both theory and practice, radicals could gain a deeper understanding into the barriers, both internal and external, that hinder our pursuits for emancipation.

On one hand, psychoanalysis as a theoretical lens, has undeniably inspired a multitude of thinkers, leading to insights across various disciplines. However, I remain somewhat unconvinced that psychoanalysis holds a unique position in offering these insights. For example, the notion that the “unconscious is historically and socially constructed” can be effectively explored through alternative models, even contemporary neuroscientific models such as Predictive Processing, i.e. how our “generative models and “precision weighting” mechanisms are shaped by prior experience, societal influences and roles, providing a compelling lens that in my opinion exceeds the explanatory (and predictive) power of psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore, I consider claims such as “capitalism fuels our death drives” to be truisms framed in psychoanalytic terms.

On the other hand, psychoanalysis as a practice — although I have no personal experience — it seems more plausible that, if “reformed”, as Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar propose in this book, it could fulfill its radical potential by giving a space to analysands to work through their past trauma, become more aware of internal conflicts, gain a deeper understanding of how these conflicts intersect with broader societal structures and even become more critical and autonomous. The obstacle, of course, is that currently, psychoanalysis runs as privatized for-profit treatment. This creates a divide where those who can benefit the most from (critical) psychoanalysis cannot afford it, while those who can afford it will not fully appreciate its “radical potential”. To this end, the authors highlight various historical attempts and current movements in support of the “free clinic”, in Europe, Argentina and Brazil among other places, and call for a universal and socially-owned clinics.

So on that note, yes, let us also seize and socialize the means of interpretation and free association.

[yogacommie]

I’ve been depressed since middle school. I’ve been suicidal in high school and university. I’ve been in therapy for two years and in analysis for one year. I’ve been on SSRI for 1,5 years.

That’s my clinical picture. I’ve been trying to reconcile my mental health problems and my politics for a while. I’ve talked to my therapists about my politics, but one of them outright defended billionaires and «all the good they do for people», and another explained my depression as simply chemicals going wrong in my brain.

In analysis I’ve found more freedom to express myself and to develop the ways I relate to myself and others. My politics evolved. And this book helped me find points I need to work on in both clinic and organising. It helped me put them together. It showed me how my lifelong psychological struggles intrinsically related to our path towards collective liberation.

[Durakov]

Wanted to like this much more than I did. There's nothing egregious or bad in it, and it might even be recommended as a solid intro to some psychoanalytic terms, or at least an only at times misleading foray into that world that will give you something to hold onto. I am no master of psychoanalysis, but I believe "drive" or "Trieb" is not synonymous with "impulse" or "compulsion" as the authors claim, for one example, which makes psychoanalysis a form of vitalism. Like a lot of vitalisms, it too often sounds like romantic cliche: “The drive is what achieves satisfaction in the capitalist process that devours the planet and corrodes the various diverse human civilizations we have created. It is also, at the same time, what is impelling us to resist this widespread devastation and moving those who fight for their cultures, for the planet, for life and against capitalism. We must choose. This is the choice we face at every moment, and especially now. Our body can be at one with us when we act, but then our nature can be turned into a machine; then our alienated body is a machine turned against us." Body versus machine, life versus death, Vital force of Gaia versus vampiric drainage of capital and the structures of dead labor.

Drive tends to find itself pulled into these sorts of poetic vagaries, as it seems to suggest a principle tying the image of psychoanalysis to naturalistic, evolutionary, and biological law. The sections on the unconscious and the repetition compulsion are not as weighed down by such vagaries, and make some nice points/ask some good questions about why we repeat that which we know to be bad/false/harmful. But the book's main fault is not that it got this or that concept right or wrong but that it's just not much of a joy to read and it lacks force or momentum. It's short but it took me way too long to read. The examples are often too broad to be engaging and the concepts barreled through too quickly with perfunctory definitions. It makes broad, imprecise claims (that I can find ways to agree with in the abstract) like "we are alienated from our bodies", but I can't help feel like it does them a disservice by writing them more like slogans than critical claims. In short, it is similar to a lot of manifestos. Perhaps it's folly to hold a manifesto to a standard outside of itself, but I claim the right in the name of the unconscious (or something).

[Roberto Yoed]

Una lectura más amena que la obra de Parker en solitario.

David Pavón da en el clavo con sus intervenciones psicoanalíticas y plantea dicho método como una posible herramienta y recurso político para la izquierda. El repaso y lectura de ciertos conceptos freudianos son frescos y enriquecedores. Una lectura obligada para los freudomarxistas. Además, tiene un increíble y certero apartado sobre las organizaciones de izquierda y cómo se autosabotean. Para aquellos que creen que el psicoanálisis es exclusivamente terapia burguesa, lean esto por favor.

Sin embargo, el problema que tuve con la obra de Parker se repite. No le veo el sentido de hablar y promover términos como anti-capitalismo, anti-patriarcado o anti cualquier otra cosa posmoderna. Es tautológico. Si nos llamamos socialistas, no hay por qué negarnos como tal. Aceptar la jerga posmoderna e identitaria nos ha hecho de por si mucho daño. Y esto no viene de un reproche burgués o familiar occidental, al contrario, viene de la certeza de que esas ideologías fueron promovidas por la CIA para desestabilizar luchas estudiantiles y a los partidos de izquierda en general. No podemos hablar con el lenguaje del enemigo, porque si lo hacemos, será complicado salir de sus trampas. El resultado es la desarticulación y atomización grupuscular que vemos en la izquierda hoy en día. Fragmentados, cada quien con su agenda de colorines, dios sabe que el capitalismo nos está haciendo polvo y añicos.

[Kylie]

I think this is a fairly good introduction to psychoanalysis for those critical of the 'expansion of the psychological at the expense of politics, society and culture.'

[hapit na madugta]

Sadly this book is a pendulum swinging hard between pontifical cringefest and insightful surprises (as is often the case with manifestos). But I like the bits about the exteriority of the unconscious, how it’s shaped by history, culture and politics. Also the parts where the authors just straight-up annihilated the ego by describing it as if it were a 21st-century liberal. I came to this book hoping to learn how psychoanalysis can be applied in the arena of political struggle, and the best answer I took away from it is by using psychoanalysis as an instrument of analysis. Psychoanalysis is best studied with the aim of forming an incisive critique of our society under capitalism. Despite its flaws and shortcomings there is still much illumination to gain from this book.

[Owl]

interesting book, inspiration comes from reading it. though it must be admitted that the form of a manifesto has some drawbacks to it. namely that a lot of claims are made without further argumentation. this leaves one guessing of the proof of set claims.

overal interesting read