Community Psychoanalysis: Collaborative Practice as Intervention

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces and elaborates the establishment of the first formal training program in Community Psychoanalysis at an accredited psychoanalytic institution: the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and the affiliated Community Psychoanalysis Consortium. We see this as a ground-breaking step in which the formal definition and scope of psychoanalysis is fundamentally transformed; it marks a sea change in what can be formally considered the domain of psychoanalysis, who it serves and what is deemed teachable in a psychoanalytic institute. We situate the development of this training model in a larger psychoanalytic history, and describe fundamental principles that undergird it.

Acknowledgment

The Community Psychoanalysis Track is made possible in part by grants from the Marsha D. McCary Div. 39 Fund for Psychoanalysis and the Sarnat-Hoffman Family Foundation.

Notes

¹ We sometimes also refer to the CPT&C, comprising the larger network that includes both the institutional training track (CPT) and the Consortium (CPC).

² The CPT was a runner-up recipient of an IPA Psychoanalysis in the Community Award at the 2018, London meetings.

³ The greater history of a sociopolitically engaged psychoanalysis is beyond the scope of this paper. For an introduction to this important legacy, see for example, Aron & Starr (2013), Gatzambide (2019), Herzog (2017), Hollander (2010), Zaretsky (2004).

⁴ There is of course an important history of non-IPA/APA institutes, perhaps especially the William Alanson White Institute, founded by renegades such as Sullivan, Fromm, Fromm-Reichman and others, out of which came a new generation of analysts like Stephen Mitchell, Jay Greenberg, and others.

⁵ Section 9, for example, mounted an effective campaign to challenge the role of psychologists in interrogation proceedings at Guantanamo, see PD (2008) Vol 18, #5. And even APsaA itself began issuing position statements on social issues by the early 1960s.

⁶ PINC is an IPA-affiliated institute, requiring three control cases for graduation (including two IPA-required cases). We believe our training model for community psychoanalysis could be modified to fit a variety of institutional requirements.

⁷ This, of course, has been radically altered by the exigencies of the COVID pandemic, and all groups and core seminars have been taking place by video conferencing since spring 2020.

⁸ It is for this reason that we favor the term “framing” as a gerund or verb, over the more static quality of the noun “frame.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco J. González

Francisco J. González, M.D., is Personal & Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst, Faculty, and Co-Director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and JAPA. His private practice offices for psychoanalysis and consultation are located in San Francisco and Oakland. He has worked publicly in community mental health since 1997, as a psychoanalytic psychiatrist and consultant at Instituto Familiar de la Raza, which serves low-income, Spanish-speaking Latinxs in San Francisco.

Rachael Peltz

Rachael Peltz, Ph.D., is a Personal and Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst and Faculty member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where she is Co-director of the Community Psychoanalysis Track. She is also a Supervising Analyst at The Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.  She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and has published papers on a variety of subjects including psychoanalytic listening, psychoanalytic depth, the dialectic of presence and absence, impasses in analytic couples work, and more recently vitalizing presences along with papers on the intersection between psyche and society including the manic society, a paper on refugee children suffering from resignation syndrome, and a discussion of the collective of the individual. She has a private practice in Berkeley, California and works with adults, adolescents, couples and families.