CRITICA

While writing the paper Who is Free to Free Associate: Psychoanalysis and Social Ethics (2025), I became interested in exploring freedom and its related ethical dimensions–not as a possession or endpoint but as a kind of ongoing, relational endeavor. I’ll share some of the ideas and authors that helped (and continue to help) me. 

The phrase “practices of freedom” caught my attention in Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom (2021; I found the Introduction chapter the most useful). In her text, Nelson pulls from others (the civil rights movement in the U.S. and Foucault to name just a couple) in her framing of freedom not as a singular, emancipatory act but as an active, evolving practice of relation to others, ideas, histories, and limits in ways that allow one to move through complexity and contradiction with care. 

Going toward Michel Foucault’s text, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom (1994), he distinguishes between liberation, which may be necessary but is not sufficient, and the ongoing ethical “practices of freedom” that must follow—an “art of existence” grounded in care of the self. These practices involve a sustained effort to live in relation to norms without being passively shaped by them. “Practices of freedom” are aesthetic and ethical, requiring us to craft a life through reflection, self-formation, and ongoing negotiation with power, not in isolation, but in the ongoing, complex proximity to others.

For me, this resonates with Édouard Glissant’s work, Poetics of Relation (1997), which helped me (re)imagine freedom not as a kind of clarity or grasp, but as relation in the face of unresolvable unknowability. Glissant’s term “donner-avec”—to give on and with—is his philosophical and poetic framing for how we might be in co-presence with one another that does not require reduction, capture, or dominance. He says, “We know ourselves as a part and as a crowd, in an unknown” (pg. 9). Glissant’s freedom is not the individual’s, intrapsychic or interpsychic, triumphant emergence into the light of recognition and knowability. Rather, it is a posture, a sensibility, or an aesthetic commitment to being-with when we do not (cannot–maybe even should not) fully understand. 

I think Glissant’s orientation finds a contemporary political echo in Wendy Brown’s recent articulation of reparative democracy (which I discussed briefly in a December end-of-year email)—a vision she describes as a response to the “violent exhaustion” of liberalism’s hollow individualism and hollowed institutions. Rather than return to an imagined past or chase a pure democratic ideal, reparative democracy acknowledges damage and contradiction and leans into repair as both a method and an ethic. Wendy Brown calls for a democracy grounded in reckoning with systemic injustices, rather than seeking redemption through superficial reforms (Brown, 2024). This, too, is a practice of freedom—not liberation from entanglement, but committed entanglement itself, practiced with care, humility, and persistence.

James Baldwin has also long argued that freedom is not a possession to be granted but a burden or moral relation to be claimed (1965, 1985, 1993). In his essays, he repeatedly returns to the idea that real freedom demands responsibility—a refusal of innocence and a commitment to remaining accountable to others, especially across lines of difference, power, and history. (And his message around this is particularly pointed at white people in the U.S.) Baldwin’s work helps me understand that freedom is not the absence of responsibility, but its condition. Baldwin, like Brown and Glissant, asks us to stay in the difficult and painful space of mutual becoming, where justice isn’t resolved once and for all, but practiced daily, in relation.

Sara Ahmed extends this sense of difficulty in her writing on feminist and institutional life. She reframes freedom not as something smooth or satisfying, but as a “practice of friction”—something that may even make us, or others, uncomfortable. In The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Living a Feminist Life (2017), she reminds us that freedom often requires disobedience, withdrawal from consensus, or saying no to the roles we’re offered. She uses the figure of the “feminist killjoy” as a symbol of how staying in relation, especially ethically, sometimes means interrupting comfort, even when doing so is costly. Freedom, for Ahmed, isn’t always a promise fulfilled. It’s a kind of staying with what is hard, in order to be honest.

These are the types of freedom I believe our institute and our field of psychoanalysis must continue to remember, learn, and practice. This may require repurposing our existing analytic capacities and an orientation (frame of care) beyond just one, two, and/or three. 

Such reckoning and growth also come with a relational debt and duty. For example, to know and appreciate where such inspired knowledge and theory-building come from. All the authors I have referred to here were not merely writing about “freedom” as an interesting, feel-good concept, or as a sterile ontological or phenomenological exercise. These brilliant thinkers are people of color, gay/queer, or both (and of course more than just those aspects of their personhood). I mention this to acknowledge that their writings and ideas are grounded in their lived experience and inherently political and engaged with the social. The ideas cannot just be separated out or away from that in service to a different (institutional) project. However, these ideas may help us find a path, inspiration, or motivation. As Critica takes up the issue of freedom in this issue, I think that it is vital that we all try to attend to how our perspectives are always grounded in lived experiences, inherently political, and in relation to the social. 

Freedom does not have to be what frees us from each other. 

Freedom might also be found in how we stay with each other, even–maybe especially–in uncertainty.

In Relation,
Elise 

References: (happy reading!)
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
Baldwin, James. (1965). White Man’s Guilt. Initially published in Ebony Magazine, reprinted in
Baldwin, J. (1985). The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. St. Martin’s Press.
Baldwin, J. (1993). The fire next time. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1963)
Brown, W. (2024). The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy. Boston Review. 
Foucault, M. (1994). The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (P. Rabinow, Ed.). The New Press.
Geltman, E. (2025). Who is free to free associate: Psychoanalysis and social ethics. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 35(1), 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2024.2444200
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Nelson, M. (2021). On Freedom. Graywolf Press. ●