Community Practice on (and off) the Couch. Response to Commentary by Dr Mario Rendon

I am grateful to Dr Rendon for reflecting with me on the ideas and experiences that I took up in my “Community Analysis” essay. I have found that his offering has provided me with valuable supervisory and consciousness-raising opportunities. I thank Dr Rendon for his acknowledgement of my attempt to bring psychoanalysis into the community, as well as for his challenge to reverse the lens and bring community and communities, including the political climate within which they exist, into the consulting room. I am eager to put this community work on the couch as a means of tapping into areas that I myself have overlooked (i.e. dissociated). And I believe that Dr Rendon has offered a chance for me to ponder my own discomfort (i.e. resistance) with ways in which I may collude with the “unconscious of [my own] society.”

There are, of course, many theoretical and practical lenses with which to view community intervention processes (e.g. primary prevention, community empowerment and revitalization, action research, and so on). I have also attempted to add a psychoanalytic lens into the mix. With this lens, we can observe that there are also many potential pitfalls involved in community practice, not least of which is falling into dissociative states wherein major political and sociological implications of the work are not adequately confronted: questions of power allocation and group process missed in lieu of more pragmatic, empirical, and theory-driven outcomes. I have wondered if, at times, many of the processes involved in long-term crisis intervention result in situations whereby practitioners, especially if we have been impacted by the same or similar traumatic events, reconnect with our own disavowed experiences of trauma - although not without significant ambivalence and resistance.

Might it be that traumatic events motivate practitioners to enact help-giving roles in order to escape from a full awareness of the anxiety and powerlessness that threatens our own sense of