CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

Cover of CERFI – Analysis Everywhere, by Susana Calo and Godofredo Enes Pereira. Minor Compositions, 2025.

CERFI – Analysis Everywhere is a research project exploring the overlooked legacy of the research cooperative CERFI (Centre d'Études de Recherche et de Formation Institutionnelle).

At a glance

The project examines the radical legacy of the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training (CERFI), a 1960s French cooperative that merged psychiatry, architecture, and political militancy.
It explores ‘schizoanalysis’ beyond the clinic, investigating how collective desire and unconscious forces can be harnessed to transform professional organisations, social infrastructures, and revolutionary struggles.
Developed through extensive interviews and archival recovery (2018–24), the research culminates in the 2025 publication CERFI – Analysis Everywhere, bringing these historical experiments into dialogue with contemporary political challenges.

School of Architecture
Research

2018 - 2025

Funding

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Royal College of Art; Het Nieuwe Instituut

Expertise

Future cities

Pages from the book CERFI – Analysis Everywhere
Pages from the book CERFI – Analysis Everywhere
Pages from the book CERFI – Analysis Everywhere
Pages from the book CERFI – Analysis Everywhere
Film still. Min Tanaka à La Borde

François Pain

1986
Film stills. L'Alma-Gare à Roubaix: quand les habitants prennent l'initiative.

Réalisateurs: Société Coopérative Ouvrière de Production participation des habitants
Diagram of staff/tasks evolution in time for the nursery of Pont Blanc

CERFI

1977

More information

The challenge

Between the radical energies of the 1960s and the shifting terrains of the 1980s, a group in France quietly detonated the boundaries of politics, psychiatry, and collective life.

CERFI – the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training – wasn’t your typical think tank. Co-founded by Félix Guattari, it set out to bring the disruptive insights of institutional psychotherapy into the heart of militant and professional organising. Their wager? That every collective needs a form of analytic militancy: a way to navigate the unconscious forces that shape power, desire, and resistance from within.

This was the birth of schizoanalysis outside of the clinical setting: a practice that shifts focus from the individual psyche to the collective assemblages that compose our lives. What are the deeper machinic drives shaping our actions? What forms of desire power our institutions? CERFI’s work took these questions seriously, designing communal infrastructures, building popular research teams, and launching Recherches, a journal that amplified voices from revolutionary struggles, childcare centers, classrooms, psychiatric wards, and beyond.

Analysis Everywhere dives into the rich archive of CERFI’s radical experiments: conceptual, editorial, and lived. It invites us to imagine a practice where the unconscious isn’t repressed but mobilised. Where analysis isn’t an afterthought but a vital tool for political transformation.

Our approach

Our goal was to rescue the experience of CERFI for discussions today. We did so with the help of the many people who have lived the experience of CERFI. Numerous meetings and conversations, conducted between 2018 and 2024, provided us with singular accounts of CERFI’ life and milieu. We have learned about the life of concepts and we have experienced them through these meetings and the relationships we formed. During the course of our research, we have also been granted access to a broad range of documents and visual materials.

Our goal in looking for visual materials was conveying CERFI’s work beyond its scholarly or textual production.

Outputs

Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira. CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry. Minor Compositions: Colchester/new York/Port Watson, 2025.

Godofredo Enes Pereira

RCA Project Lead

Susana Caló

Co-investigator, King’s College London

“'Only Desire Can Read Desire,’ wrote Félix Guattari, and this quote, which Caló and Pereira use as the title of their introduction, expresses the precious specificity of this book. Caló and Pereira’s desire to revive the passionate adventure of CERFI testifies to the fact that this adventure has become contemporary again, something like a resurgence, the reappearance of what had been eradicated and which is returning, transformed but alive.”
Isabelle Stengers Member of CERFI
“Very important work has been done by Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira on the historical and visual reconstruction of a cultural experiment whose practical and theoretical effects have not yet been fully evaluated.”
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
“The visionary experiment of CERFI once crossed French politics breaking up the borders of psychoanalysis, architecture, and militancy. It revived the lesson of institutional psychotherapy that the hospital is ill, not the patient. Against the apathy of the Left, it envisioned institutions of research, care, and collective planning. This book extends its legacy and political imagination to the present, to a time in which the rise of authoritarianism demands new strategies of organisation and intervention.”
Matteo Pasquinelli Author of The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence
“This careful and thorough work revisits the radical experiments of institutional psychotherapy to ask a question that remains urgent today: what makes analysis possible? Drawing on the legacy of CERFI, the book illuminates a unique convergence of clinical innovation and institutional reinvention and reflects on the conditions for analytical militancy. A vital contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic thought, this is a book that insists – against all odds – on the enduring power of collective desire.”
Lizaveta van Munsteren Author of The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930-1980.
“Today’s virulent return of normopathic subjectivities is a sign that fascism is ascendent again, now amplified by powerful technologies of semiotic entrainment. In this context, reactivating CERFI’s commitment to make the libidinal workable in the context of organising, building, and liberating could not be more important and urgent.”
Adrian Lahoud Author of The Rights of Future Generations
“A red thread connects the political thought of Deleuze and Guattari back to the analytic practice developed at institutions like the La Borde clinic: the idea that militant practice must always involve an analysis of desire, of the unconscious libidinal relations that traverse both militants and the reality on which they seek to intervene. If one group tried to live out this principle and explore its implications, it was CERFI. To recover its history and work is [...] to relaunch this proposition into our own time”
Rodrigo Nunes Author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation
“The transformative history of 20th-century psychiatry is a collective history. However, the ways in which history is often written struggle to give voice to the collective, favouring the work of great men. In this extraordinary book, Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira explore a collective form for the collective history of CERFI, where a profusion of voices, images and archives also document life”
Joana Masó Author of Tosquelles: Healing Institutions