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“Collaboration is the principle which sets the frame for the un-learning and deconstruction of analytic shibboleths,” write Rachael Peltz and Francisco González (this issue, p. 418). Their words speak to a principle that guides the work of the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. It’s a principle that also guides us, the journal’s editors, as we seek to invite new voices and present new topics in our pages while also celebrating the innovation and controversy that built the relational tradition and set it in dialogue with psychoanalysis writ large.
Collaboration requires hard work. To learn and unlearn “takes a village” as they say. To learn and build takes a community which puts us ever-always in contact with one another and with the worlds we variously inhabit, some of them as identifiable as the streets of a town or the inhabitants of a social group, others as abstract as the gatherings of like-subjects who coalesce around hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. Collaboration can be intentional or unconscious; consensual or compelled; generative or reactionary. Community Psychoanalysis is distinguished both by its effort to work together with community-based partners, to create needed social change and, also, for its keen attention to how communities constitute the location of care in inequitable hierarchies of access that spawn strategies for intervention at the level of the group.
In this issue, we interrogate the notion of community and its intersection with psychoanalysis in all its diversity, exploring multiple ways in which we are connected and interconnected, our lives interwoven across time and space. We travel first to Peltz and González’s description of the Community Psychoanalysis Track and Consortium in San Francisco. Supervising psychoanalyst Lee Slome details the work of the track’s clinical Core Seminar; Lani Chow and Maria Seymour St. John immerse us in the dialogue that ensues between representa