Free Association Books

Free Association Books was an innovative project started in 1980s London. It arose as the brainchild of Bob Young and colleagues, who, disillusioned by the decline of the liberatory movement, began a search using psychoanalysis to understand the problems of liberation. Other key figures involved in the movement were Michael Rustin, Karl Figlio, Barry Richards, Andrew Samuels, Bob Hinshelwood, Andrew Cooper. It grew quickly into a publishing house which produced well-made books by a new international generation of young psychoanalysts.

Its house journal was Free Associations, and its annual conference, "Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere" ran in conjunction with the University of East London. It inspired a great many looking for an intellectual home, and resulted in the enormous increase in of interest in psychoanalysis in Britain during the 1990s. As a product of the British left, it was original in promoting psychoanalysis in the radical form, typical of a 100 years previously. As such it is a unique phenomenon in the cultural history of Britain and of psychoanalysis.