How would psychoanalysis change if it placed community mental health at the center of its priorities?
Austin talks with psychoanalysts Nancy Burke and Matthew Oyer about the history and present of community psychoanalysis: from Freud’s free clinics and institutional psychotherapy to Chicago’s Kedzie Center and LoSAH Center of Hope, New York’s Greene Clinic, and a new Community Psychoanalysis Training program connecting clinicians and institutions across cities.
They discuss the effects of ICE raids on clinical work in Chicago, psychoanalytic approaches to psychosis, the economics of analytic training, and the problem of making intensive treatment available to people who have historically been excluded from it. Along the way, the conversation asks what psychoanalysis might learn—and become—when community practice is understood not simply as a site for applying psychoanalytic ideas, but as a place where new psychoanalytic ideas can emerge.
Little Hysterics is a podcast of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, featuring conversations with clinicians, artists, and thinkers about psychoanalytic ideas and the contemporary clinic.
References:
- Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938
- Sigmund Freud, “Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1919 [1918])
- Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926)
- François Tosquelles / Jean Oury / institutional psychotherapy
- Alfred H. Stanton & Morris S. Schwartz, The Mental Hospital: A Study of Institutional Participation in Psychiatric Illness and Treatment
- Gabriel Tupinambá
- Lafargue Clinic
Sites mentioned:
- Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago:
The Kedzie Center: thekedziecenter.org
LoSAH Center of Hope: losahcenter.org - The Greene Clinic: greeneclinic.com
- The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis: communitypsychoanalysis.org
img: A dying man surrounded by fantastic and mythological figures. Coloured etching with watercolour, 30.4 × 40.8 cm. Wellcome Collection, 16062i. View at Wellcome Collection