Abandoning the Analytic Frame

In analytic practice, we are taught and trained to maintain a therapeutic frame and analytic identity, both of which can impede and interfere with engagement in community settings. This paper will explore ways in which we can adjust our analytic stance on a collective level in the service of community. In community psychoanalysis, the ability to be flexible, humble, and adaptive to the community environment is a call to action to shift the frame.

“Community psychoanalysis” is psychoanalysis outside the consultation room providing interventions to a group, agency, school, or organization. It is also a “way of working” that opens possibilities for connection and sustaining care for the most vulnerable populations, specifically the impoverished, the elderly, children, marginalized groups, and the mentally ill. In addition to that, it is a mode of intervention that is applied to the community at large, for example with police, hospitals, schools, or an intervention to a traumatic incident in a community.

What does it take to shift the paradigm to work beyond the consultation room? I have tried to explain this concept to many of my colleagues, and they are still befuddled by what exactly community psychoanalysis is and who exactly it serves. Is it psychoanalysis in marginalized communities? Yes. Is it at community mental health clinics? Yes. Is it interventions for hard-to-reach populations? Yes, it is all of these scenarios, but it is also the community at large—for example, providing a community intervention at a macro level to train police.

We can turn to Stuart Twemlow, who has written extensively on this subject and is known for his work with anti-bullying at a school: “A community analyst is required to exercise flexibility in technique and personal humility when embracing an analytic identity derived from a mode of action” (Twemlow, 2013). I discovered Dr. Mark Borg (2005), who uses an interpersonal perspective focused on transference/counter-transference at an insti