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This article aims to describe the objectives of free psychoanalysis centers in France. Through their ambition to open up to the “social,” understood as promoting the accessibility of treatment to socio-economically vulnerable patients, we will see that they operate as places of resistance and defense of psychoanalysis at the same time as they rework some of its foundations. As centers face ethical and practical dilemmas around the absence of economic exchange, this paper intends to interrogate the tensions around the “social” mission of centers, in a context where the literature shows that analysts contribute to forging a mythology of “social exceptionalism.”