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I approach the task of writing a piece on community psychoanalysis with more wonderings than conclusions. As someone who is new to psychoanalytic theory and practice, I struggle with insecurity about my ability to both leverage and challenge the field.
…only if we adopt a transformative justice paradigm on the interpersonal, institutional, and community level will those patterns eventually come to fruition on the macro-structural level. This involves a commitment to radical honesty transparency, interdependence, reparation, and political action…
However, if we believe Freud's assertion that we approach every psychoanalytic encounter with novelty, perhaps it is exactly this discomfort, uncertainty, and skepticism that primes me to write about community psychoanalysis—a term that is buzzing through our spaces but lacking in shared definition.
What is community psychoanalysis? Do those of us who claim to want to figure it out have a shared interest in radical structural transformation on a societal level, as we do on the psychic level? If so, what is our theory of societal change and where do we expect psychoanalysis to fit into that? What does psychoanalysis have to offer? How might psychoanalysis, as we know it, need to be disrupted? If we interrogate how some of the core elements that qualify psychoanalysis might or might not translate to a community setting, at what point of disruption does psychoanalysis become unrecognizable to itself?
What I have to offer in the conversation about community psychoanalysis is my background in a different framework: transformative justice.1 A movement originally developed2 in opposition to the carceral state's punitive and inequitable response to law-breaking, transformative justice aims to (re) imagine how we might bring justice in ways that lead to healing and societal change or “justice that transforms the root cause of injustice” (Brown, 2017, p.133). Transformative justice values the transparency, radical honesty, and accountab