Prologue: The Community Analyst in Troubled Worlds

Historically, the array of community interventions by psychoanalysts is impressive. Yet, in relation to the clinical work of the vast majority of analysts, it represents a minimal commitment and suggests that organized psychoanalysis does not value the work of community psychoanalysis. Subsequently, there is no career path for advancement for analysts immersed in community activities. To the contrary, organized psychoanalysis questions whether a “community” identity can be truly psychoanalytic or even equivalent to the branch of applied psychoanalysis that addresses art and literature.1 With respect to the latter, the contributions of Freud and his heirs have made the application of psychoanalysis to the arts and literature an accepted tradition; analysts who contribute to it have not met with the resistance encountered by those colleagues who get their hands dirty in the trenches. In their comprehensive elaboration of community psychoanalysis, Twemlow and Parens (2009) described how this type of work is “marginalized, at times, with dismissive interest and even approbation.” In Psychoanalysis at the Margins (2009), Paul Stepansky presented a scholarly exposition of the ambivalence of organized psychoanalysts toward the work of the community psychoanalysts, which includes poignant commentaries.

Nevertheless, Freud noted in his New Introductory Lectures that the greatest legacy of psychoanalysis would not be as individual therapy but as an influence on child rearing in future generations. Community psychoanalysis uses the concepts of unconscious motivation, repetition of the past, defensive operations, projection and projective identification, regression, the importance of infantile sexuality and aggression, transference, and countertransference to understand disturbances in communities, war, traumatic loss, learning inhibitions, and the sequellae of sexual and physical abuse. But the context in which such ideas are ap