Theory and Practice: World Pushes Back

Hosts and Loren argue theory and clinical practice are dialectically related; new contexts should reshape psychoanalytic concepts.

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Episode notes

Abby and Patrick welcome returning guest Loren Dent. As co-director of Brooklyn’s Greene Clinic, Loren is the ideal person to unpack the history, meaning, and contemporary landscape of community psychoanalysis. Drawing on Brazilian analyst Gabriel Tupenambá’s idea of the “institutional circuit,” Loren walks Abby and Patrick through a history extending from Freud’s hopes for a “psychoanalysis for the people” to the refugee analyst diasporas of WW2 to the interventions of Jacques Lacan to contemporary efforts to bring a community psychoanalytic orientation to analytic institutions around the United States. As Loren, Abby, and Patrick explore, the idea of community also psychoanalysis raises questions about the communities psychoanalysis can serve, communities it has previously excluded, and psychoanalytic institutions as communities in their own right. Topics include the relationship between theory, practice, and doctrine; differing national histories of psychoanalysis; ego psychology and the question of adaptation; the embededness of signifiers; hierarchies and antagonisms within analytic institutions, as well as efforts to reconstellate them; the complicated stakes of “expanding access”; burnout as both an individual condition and institutional symptom; what drives people to practice psychoanalysis in the first place, and more.

More about Loren at the Greene Clinic and about his courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Works cited:

Gabriel Tupinambá, The Desire of Psychoanalysis, Exercises in Psychoanalytic Thinking.

Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis.

Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-1938.

Emily Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich.

Resources:

Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) Community Psychoanalysis Track & Consortium

The Greene Clinic

Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy

The Kedzie Center, Chicago