Community health institutions have long resisted psychoanalytic thinking, and the siloed psychoanalytic world similarly makes little room for the experience and knowledge of those institutions and the psychic lives of their workers and clients. A clinician who appreciates psychoanalytic insights and understanding and wants to practice in a community setting would find it nearly impossible to integrate both in their work.

A panel of three distinguished psychoanalysts, involved in community settings and contending with the issues that prevail there – poverty, homelessness, racism, immigration, their effects on health, and the economics of community mental health – will speak to what psychoanalysis and community mental health workers and institutions can learn and gain from one another for mutual their benefit.

Our panelists will present new interventions and programs that attempt to bridge the psychoanalysis-community gulf by creatively engaging both psychoanalysts in their institutes and societies and community mental health workers in their institutions in what is becoming community psychoanalysis. The audience will be invited to imagine how they might engage in this new field in their own practice and professional lives.