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This issue follows the June 2023 publication of our first special issue on community mental health and applied psychoanalysis: An international appraisal. The goal of these two issues has been to present a contemporary account of the role psychodynamic treatment plays in a representative selection of community mental health clinics across the US and in a number of countries in Europe and the Middle East, in Australia, and in Chile.
The first volume began with the analysis of a modest study gauging the effect of remote individual psychodynamic supervisory sessions on 12 clinicians in a traditional community mental health center in Long Island, NY. None of these clinicians were familiar with psychoanalytic concepts and practice (Boulanger & Rosenberg, 2023). At the conclusion of this study, despite the quantitative analysis demonstrating significant changes in work satisfaction and self-perceptions of development as a therapist, and general enthusiasm for psychodynamic supervision and process as revealed in the qualitative analysis, the administration in this clinic, that had initially shared the authors' concern about staff burnout, remained impervious to the findings. Instead, they were compelled to give in to pressure from state mental health authorities to increase demands on staff therapists for additional and more complex paperwork. Under these circumstances, proposed opportunities to continue exploring psychodynamic skills in weekly group meetings were abandoned. Within a year, seven of the 12 clinicians in this study had left the clinic to accept positions in the private sector where they had been assured of opportunities to learn and practice psychodynamically.
It is against this background, the now familiar story of psychodynamic work being cast aside in favor of what insurance companies and state mental health regulators consider the necessary documentation of “evidence based treatment,” that the other American contributors in the first volume describe how th