Two Spaces, Two Affected Worlds

On February 22, 2025, I biked from my home in South Brooklyn to 81 Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn. There, I attended the Group for Independent Formation’s conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics: The Impossible Relation. Today, October 12, 2025, I entered a nursing home dementia ward in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my younger brother is celebrating his 37th birthday. Two spaces, two affective worlds.

As I settled into the first day of the conference—Dunkin coffee and notepad in hand—I noticed a few stars of the New York psychoanalytic scene taking their seats. At the time, I was completing my clinical MSW degree, thrilled to be among potential new colleagues, yet aware of my twofold identity as filmmaker and psychotherapist. I was curious where this tension might arise throughout the conference; the past two years held several pinpricks of ambivalence, though I had found my greatest alignment within psychoanalytic practice. Almost theatrically, on high seats along stage right sat an assemblage of artists invited as commentators. Among them was a friend who works at the intersection of music, activism, and psychoanalysis, and a recognizable poet from the art world—though both went unnamed in the program. The atmosphere seemed to be staging this very tension. Were these artists negotiating the same boundaries as I?

My notes from day one are furious—a swirl of single, floating words: position, frame, fear, fascism. Hanging phrases on myth, the libidinal link, self-authorization, the French, and Palestine. Sideways near the spine, a quote without a citation: “We are all in the world with a shared symptom.” Opposite, a doodle—dots chasing one another across the page. During the panel with Avgi Saketopoulou, I had written: Is social/political engagement a ‘conceptual break’ from psychoanalysis and the consultation room? Somewhere in the chaos of these notes, Dolar’s (2008) inquiry from “Freud and the Political” hung in the room: how can psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s professed distance from politics, not be political?

By the start of day two, my notes had begun to congeal. Something was taking shape. Christopher Chamberlin, a candidate analyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis who, the day before, had been the subject of an inside psychoanalytic castration joke, opened with an introduction to Le 388, a clinic for young adults with psychosis in Québec. Founded in 1982 by a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, Le 388 proposed that psychosis could be listened to—that the symptom, rather than a mere disturbance, might be an expression of the human condition. The clinic prioritized subjectivity over symptom suppression, marking a radical departure from conventional psychiatry.

In North America, medication has dominated treatment for psychosis since the 1980s. Many clinicians still see psychosis as unanalyzable. Against this backdrop, Le 388 offered something more humanistic. The clinic lobbied policymakers, engaged psychiatrists, created a democratic therapeutic space, offered patients a welcoming and creative community, and provided free semi-residential care under public health insurance. But in March 2025, the clinic, which had operated for over forty years, would be forced to close. Dolar (2008) wrote that psychoanalysis “circumscribes a site, a locus of the political, without ever quite stepping into the site itself” (p. 28). Chamberlin (2025) suggested that in the story of Le 388, that line had been crossed: the political had entered the analytic frame. The clinic’s impending closure, Chamberlin (2025) said, was not merely bureaucratic. It was also a defeat for the Freudian cause.

In the months following the Brooklyn conference, I spoke with Chamberlin, and I soon became engulfed by the GIFRIC members and their work at Le 388. In particular, I devoured Vanderwees’s (2019) interview, Treating Psychosis in Québec: A Conversation with the Founders of GIFRIC and the 388. I discovered that at Le 388, the dreams of psychotic patients were analyzed; their creative work was considered vital. The analyst did not presume to know, interpret, or assign meaning. It was the psychotic who knew—and was encouraged to find their own meaning. Patients were invited to speak what they had been unable to say elsewhere, and psychotic breaks were not merely medicated but supported and spoken through afterward. Treatment at Le 388 included a holistic approach that encompassed medical, psychiatric, and psychological interventions, as well as community support and social integration.

The work at Le 388 echoed in me personally. My younger brother, who lives with schizophrenia, has spent much of his life cycling through short-term state psychiatric, correctional, and medical institutions, often narrowly avoiding being discharged to homeless shelters. Eleven years ago, after watching him ricochet between facilities, he and I traveled across the United States searching for long-term, humane residential treatment options—spaces that might meet him with understanding rather than control. What I found were mostly historical or theoretical precedents (e.g., R. D. Laing; Institutional Psychiatry), but nothing currently operating that reflected the kind of treatment we hoped for. A few facilities came closer—such as Windhorse Community Services in Colorado—but none were accessible with Medicare.

Now, more than a decade later, he lives on the dementia floor of a nursing home in Ohio—a space never intended for long-term psychological care. The only long-term mental health facilities available in the state are correctional institutions—jails. The dementia ward, where he now lives, is the best available option. There, he has minimal social interaction, no access to the outdoors, and no therapeutic support. I can’t help but connect his situation to the underlying perspectives on psychosis that our society and psychiatric systems continue to hold. It is what initially drew me to this research and what ignited my interest on the day of the conference: how individuals experiencing psychosis are perceived within our systems, and how these prevailing philosophies shape the treatment they receive.

As I read through Vanderwees’s (2019) interview, my brother was front of mind—a dual experience of time and place. How might I restore to my brother a sense of subjectivity? I began developing a visual book (“Ode to le 388”) structured around the 2019 GIFRIC interview. The interview text is visually and structurally disrupted—presenting only highlighted statements through a process of erasure (inspired by my collaborator, Eliza Lu Doyle). Visually, I draw on footage from the 2014 journey I took with my brother, when we searched for alternative treatment facilities for psychosis. I extracted frames—fragments of visual memory—and wove them into the text. Cut-outs within the images mirror the text erasures across the page. I wanted to represent the sensation of disappearance—to account for those erased by our systems, and for the recent loss of Le 388 itself. On the first page of the book, Le 388 founder Willy Apollon is quoted: “One of the first surprises for the psychotic who comes to Le 388 is doubtless discovering for the first time someone who is prepared to listen to him, instead of being only interested in his symptoms, his behavior, and his reaction to medication” (Apollon, as cited in Vanderwees, 2019). This visual project became an attempt to merge time and space—to symbolically place my brother within the perspectives at Le 388, at the clinic, dreaming and being listened to.

Psychosis resists conventional language; it speaks in symbols. My brother and I often communicate through non-verbal forms: gesture, pattern, silence. This visual project attempts to meet the language of psychosis itself. The closure of Le 388 reminds us that our systems continue to marginalize those who live at the edges of comprehension. By working directly with the clinic founders’ words, I hope to re-present their interview as both testimony and resistance—to offer a counter-paradigm to the dehumanizing frameworks that often shape psychiatric treatment. This, to me, is political.

Rereading my notes from the final panel of the conference, I find Eric L. Santner’s words—a scholar of modern German literature and critical theory whose work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis, political theology, and philosophy: “Art is a part of the project that psychoanalysis is engaged in. It changes the self, in the body” (E. L. Santner, personal communication, February 22, 2025). I feel affirmed in my instinct to make sense of the conference’s ideas through the bodily impulse of art. If the political could enter the analytic frame at Le 388—even briefly—could I attempt something similar, symbolically, with this project? From where I write now—inside the hum of medical machinery, my brother’s voice, soft and inquisitive, rising somewhere down the hall—I think of Le 388: the belief that psychosis is not an interruption to be silenced, but a message to be heard. Psychoanalysis and politics may never fully converge, but I wonder if, in their attempts and failures to meet, something vital might emerge. The closure of Le 388 reminds us of a shared symptom—how easily society erases what it cannot translate. This work is an attempt to hold the impossible relation open.