Psychoanalysis and the Community - Introductory Considerations

The widening of the field of psychoanalysis toward enquiry of the social dimension of human existence is not limited to theory, but it also implies an expansion of our ability to conduct therapeutic interventions in diverse human situations.

Community psychoanalysis has deep historical roots.1 Using PEP-Web to search for psychoanalysis in the community yields 1856 results, beginning with the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Trigant Burrow (1914)2 who conceptualized psychoanalysis as a social science, coined the term “group therapy” and stressed the communal aspects of psychic functioning. Despite the ongoing contributions to the literature, including the burgeoning of articles on community psychoanalysis in the 2000s, there is a resistance in our field to incorporating community psychoanalysis into what we consider as the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and into our programmes of psychoanalytic training and education. In the USA one pioneering exception has been the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), an IPA-accredited institute, and the affiliated Community Psychoanalysis Consortium (Chow and St. John 2021; González and Peltz 2021).

The need for this Section in the IJP emerged from our collective recognition that there is a growing number of papers focused on community psychoanalysis, but no dedicated intellectual home for those papers in this journal. Our initial intention was to create a single Special Issue with that focus. Our Call for Papers elicited 57 submissions from 15 countries on a wide range of topics such as the relevance and applicability of psychoanalytic perspectives to engaging with survivors of sexual trafficking in the USA, reflecting on racist violence and colonialism in Australia, working with refugees and asylum seekers from Central America, and understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on staff working in mental health services in t