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Published online: 3 January 2023
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
“Whether the primary focus is revitalization of disinvested neighborhoods or support of integration programs, from a trauma-informed perspective, the first priority must be safety, without which little else can flourish” (p. 145). This quote summarizes the essence of Annie Stopford’s call to her readers. She understands the need for a sense of safety as fundamental and universal to social life and argues that it is desired even by perpetrators of violence in the most marginalized, hard-scrabble urban neighborhoods. The antithesis of that safety is chaos and vulnerability, a consequence of the chronic struggle to survive at the bottom of American society, generation after generation. That circumstance grinds lives down and produces a toxicity that is difficult to repair. Stopford argues that is also the most important challenge facing American society.
Stopford speaks from within the psychoanalytic fold, where many have awakened to the critical importance of engaging racism and the social disparities of the communities that surround us. There are psychoanalytic therapists working with the homeless, with immigrants, and in communities ravaged for generations by a combination of violence, economic poverty, and racism. Psychoanalytic institutes increasingly present programing on relevant topics and some institute faculty are actively involved in community-based projects. However, Annie Stopford’s Trauma and Repair: Confronting Segregation and Violence in America takes us a step deeper into the kind of engagement that is needed if psychoanalysis (or anything else, for that matter) is to contribute substantively to the social challenges facing our communities.
Psychoanalytic efforts to address such societal issues, especially those that exist at the intersection of race, economic poverty, and violence, are still sporadic and fledgling in their development. There is a great