“Community” is a word that is used frequently in everyday exchanges and, increasingly, in public policies and government funding strategies. Mental health promotion campaigns strongly promote “community-focused” initiatives. The predominant discourse on the topic of “community” has been from socio-political perspectives. Very little has been written specifically about the nature of communities, or their psychodynamics, from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper, the first of three, considers three major conceptualizations of communities - philosophical, sociological and ecological - from a psychoanalytic perspective. Within this paradigm, a community, unless arbitrarily defined, is as much a subjective notion as it is an objective entity. Psychoanalysis has much to add to the current thinking on this subject by adding a description of its dynamic qualities, and highlighting the subjective experience (both individual and collective, conscious and unconscious) of communities.