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The June 2016 University Forum included Janet L. Smith, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Voorhies Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Angela Hurlock, an architect and Executive Director of Claretian Associates, with Robert Galatzer-Levy as moderator. Laurence Ralph, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, could not attend but provided his paper for this report. Although the panel, held at the APsaA meeting in Chicago, wrestled with questions particular to that city, participants addressed issues equally relevant to other major cities across the country: How to revitalize inner city areas like the South Side of Chicago that suffer from underdevelopment and lack of resources, leaving their populations underserved and impoverished? Further, can psychoanalysis help? If so, how?
A basic requirement for revitalizing a community is providing for the safety of its residents. A UNICEF statement in 2016 noted that “despite intellectual debates about the definition of childhood and cultural differences about what to expect of children, there has always been a substantial degree of shared understanding that childhood implies a separated and safe space.” Thus, within their respective cultures, children require a safe environment, free from violence and trauma, for their play and education, as well as for social connections and healthy attachments.
Patrick Bracken (2002) offers us a model for thinking about how people function within communities. Bracken states that all of us function in the world, whatever our cultural context, because we have a sense of “underlying coherence” that provides meaning through an expectable, organizing way of establishing early patterns, which get folded deeply into ourselves. As psychoanalysts we can contribute our understanding of how environmental affordances and traumas impact one's sense of self and can offer evidence that the processes of internalization are largely unconscious.