“A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis”: The Community Psychoanalysis Consortium and the Community Consultants

This paper describes the functioning of the Community Psychoanalysis Consortium (CPC) and the role of the Community Consultants in the Community Psychoanalysis Track at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. The existence of the CPC and its projects is an interruption of psychoanalytic training as exclusive to privatized psychotherapeutic practice, reclaiming and extending psychoanalytic pedagogical traditions that thrive in community mental health contexts. Persistent difficulties encountered in the exchanges between those steeped in institutional psychoanalysis versus community mental health are illustrated and analyzed as symptoms of a series of broader cultural splits. The work of the CPC is a collective effort toward training psychoanalysts to perform transgressive psychoanalytic community-based work. We see this effort as essential, as those community programs that continue to operate do so under continual threat of being dismantled and/or defunded. We assert, however, that community psychoanalysis is not primarily about expanding the borders of who gets analyzed. Rather, it is about who takes up the analytic gaze, what depths are probed, what resistances are seen to be at issue, and what other investments might be possible when dominant structures are confronted and collective libidinal resources are freed up.