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Psychoanalysts have traditionally not been known to reach beyond their boundaries to lend a helping hand to the community around them. Psychoanalytic language is a quicksand of complex and often obscurely defined terms, with theories emerging almost exclusively from clinical material derived from psychiatrically disturbed patients. Freud, who in all likelihood wrote more by page count on non-clinical topics, had expansive interests and an insatiable curiosity for knowledge in almost every field of human endeavor. It might be that these broad interests will end up rescuing psychoanalysis from relative obscurity as a clinical technique for a tiny, very specialized group of patients. Freud meandered through medical school with many detours into zoology, neurology, and philosophy among other fields. His wide-ranging interests are reflected in the current work of many analysts not trapped in an economically driven clinical framework, who are developing unique theoretical and conceptual bridges for their work outside of the consulting room, which is not necessarily directly derived from clinical practice, although may be influenced by it.
Many of the founding members of our association and journal contributed to a book, Analyst in the Trenches, edited by Bruce Sklarew, Stuart Twemlow, and Sallye Wilkinson. Recently published by Analytic Press, this book records 12 projects designed to show how psychoanalytic thinking can address urgent social and community violence.
The language of community and social psychoanalysis is clearly not derived only from clinical work. In a recent attempt to formulate a curriculum for institutes which may wish to teach psychoanalytic applications to community and social problems, the basic principles, at first blush, seem derived from treating disturbed people with community psychoanalysis as a subspeciality of that work. Some of us feel that in the future this may change. Workers like Volkan, Bion, Pine, and many others have shown that a whole