“Collaboration is the principle which sets the frame for the un-learning and deconstruction of analytic shibboleths,” write Rachael Peltz and Francisco González (this issue, p. 418). Their words speak to a principle that guides the work of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. It’s a principle that also guides us, the journal’s editors, as we seek to invite new voices and present new topics in our pages while also celebrating the innovation and controversy that built the relational tradition and set it in dialogue with psychoanalysis writ large.
Collaboration requires hard work. To learn and unlearn “takes a village” as they say. To learn and build takes a community which puts us ever-always in contact with one another and with the worlds we variously inhabit, some of them as identifiable as the streets of a town or the inhabitants of a social group, others as abstract as the gatherings of like-subjects who coalesce around hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. Collaboration can be intentional or unconscious; consensual or compelled; generative or reactionary. Community Psychoanalysis is distinguished both by its effort to work together with community-based partners, to create needed social change and, also, for its keen attention to how communities constitute the location of care in inequitable hierarchies of access that spawn strategies for intervention at the level of the group.
In this issue, we interrogate the notion of community and its intersection with psychoanalysis in all its diversity, exploring multiple ways in which we are connected and interconnected, our lives interwoven across time and space. We travel first to Peltz and González’s description of the Community Psychoanalysis Track and Consortium in San Francisco. Supervising psychoanalyst Lee Slome details the work of the track’s clinical Core Seminar; Lani Chow and Maria Seymour St. John immerse us in the dialogue that ensues between representatives of a Community Consortium and PINC faculty and candidates.
Ortal Slobodin initially presented her research on community interventions with Bedouin girls at the 2019 IARPP conference in Tel Aviv in receipt of the Muriel Dimen Prize for interdisciplinary collaboration in psychoanalysis. In this paper, Slobodin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman consider the application of relational concepts in therapeutic work within a Bedouin community; cogently demonstrating the way core concepts can be differentially interpreted through the lens of culture. Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro return to our pages with an in-depth discussion of “fractal epistemologies” to companion their paper in 31:3 on intuition. Their work takes community to the meta level where we are all connected in relational configurations that parse meanings in contexts. You will find in the discussions by Adrienne Harris and Duncan Cartwright an exploration of the many threads in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking that explore different iterations of this new kind of interconnectedness. And we return to the front lines of community work with a diverse collection of Snapshots from colleagues around the world engaging in a wide range of Community Psychoanalysis projects. Their inspiring work takes psychoanalysis out of the consulting room, and into the public sector, grounded in an ethical responsibility of care for each other as citizens and analysts. Over the course of this past year, the notion of Mutual Aid has entered the collective consciousness, characterized by bottom-up, grass-roots structures of cooperation and networks of solidarity that sustain the life of a community. At levels large and small, these projects embody this ethos.
Welcome to Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31:4.