Where Does Psychoanalysis Happen?

Children play. There are plenty of ways to theorize this activity, which psychoanalysis does; it theorizes as well what might be leveraged in play for therapeutic purposes. But anyone who has spent time playing with children knows the thrill that comes from the spontaneity of working together, in real time; knows the significance of the moment of creation that can occur by such a method; knows that serious work and play are in no way opposed to each other. I wanted to organize a roundtable on work with children for “Psychoanalysis in Extension”1 in part because work with children teaches us something about the creative element in psychoanalysis—and in living. It seems to me that children, as the sites of so many cultural and political battles, might be an important starting point in thinking through what is being asked of psychoanalysis today. If the conference was asking about psychoanalysis in extension, it was also asking how psychoanalysis interacts with the broader culture, and what methods of psychoanalytic transmission are best suited to making an intervention into the contemporary scene. To interrogate contemporary work with children might be a fruitful avenue for thinking through these questions.

The panel took on the topic of work with children and teenagers in institutional settings: schools, foster care and legal systems, medical establishments. Even in the consulting room, to work with a child means also to work with the various institutions that converge around the child’s body and person: the institution will always find its way into psychoanalytic work. What was interesting to me was also the reverse action: how a psychoanalytic epistemology might make its way into the institutional settings in which children are inevitably bound up. What kind of intervention might come from this?

The question is becoming increasingly urgent. In the (post) pandemic era, with climate change, local and global political and economic crises, as well as shifts in cultural c