Community Psychoanalysis and its Other Ways

Over the past three years, I have conducted ethnographic research on contemporary psychoanalysis with a focus on how the discipline, as practiced in New York City (where I live) and beyond, shifted over the course of the pandemic. These past three years, however, have not been “normal” for most anyone, anywhere, or at least that is how it appears from afar, to Us, whoever us is. It is clear, however, that We believe that never in history have we had a global event (as portrayed in the current cultural imaginary) as capable of instigating, or perhaps as representing of, universal upheaval in mind and body. It is not surprising, then, that a Western science premised on the idea that the individual human finds oneself bound, psychically and somatically, to the civilization(s) in which they are born and made, would react. An emergent movement in community psychoanalysis constitutes one such reaction. As a director at a psychoanalytic institute remarked to me, “We have always worked in the community.” Yet it appears to this ethnographer that when people use the word community now, it indexes something quite different—something that refers to psychoanalysis not only across classes and cultures, but within the civilizational globalization (mondialisation) that the pandemic foregrounds.

Psychoanalysts, amongst others, have characterized these past years of the pandemic as presenting dual crises: the effects of the pandemic itself as social isolation, economic and other forms of precarity, and exposure to death; and the revelation (for some, or in some ways) and amplification of inequity in this nation. These dual crises, perhaps in an overdetermined way, provoke the eruption of a reckoning with the racist underpinnings of nationalism across the United States and elsewhere, while also solidifying political divisions. During this time, we have witnessed what appears to be an increasingly polarized state, which seems to represent values between groups of people that are incomme