140: Psychoanalysis for the People feat. Loren Dent

Apr 11, 2026

Loren Dent, clinical psychologist and co-director at Brooklyn’s Greene Clinic, discusses the history and modern practice of community psychoanalysis. He traces institutional shifts from Freud to refugee analysts, contrasts national training paths, and explores who community care serves. Conversations touch on burnout, access, and how institutions shape clinical work.

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ANECDOTE

Freud's Call For Clinics Born From WWI

Dent traces Freud's Budapest 1918 call for free clinics to World War I trauma and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
He cites Freud's 1918 speech urging clinics for 'neurotic misery' as a response to wartime catastrophe.

insights

INSIGHT

Diasporas Shaped American Psychoanalysis

Refugee analyst diasporas after WWII shaped US psychoanalysis toward professionalization and medical alignment.
Dent and Patrick note exile, anti-Semitism, and survival pressures influenced theoretical turns like ego psychology.

insights

INSIGHT

Freud Supported Flexible Paths To Training

Freud accepted case-by-case routes to becoming analysts and didn't insist on universal institutional training.
Dent contrasts that with later expanded professionalization tied to licenses, insurance, and legal constraints.

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Loren Dent: Background and Greene Clinic Work

08:41 • 4min

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Community Definitions and Clinical Stakes

12:54 • 2min

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Who Counts as Analysable?

14:57 • 2min

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Tupinambá, Lacan, and Institutional Ideology

16:38 • 4min

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Theory and Practice: World Pushes Back

20:45 • 3min

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Psychoanalysis Amid Social Catastrophes

23:17 • 5min

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Refugee Analysts and American Professionalization

28:27 • 3min

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Lay Analysis, Freud's Flexibility, and Training Paths

31:44 • 7min

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Defining Community Psychoanalysis Today

38:50 • 4min

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Local Infrastructure Shapes Practice

42:36 • 3min

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Why the Term Reemerged

45:36 • 4min

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Who Does Community Work? Power and Precarity

49:50 • 9min

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Burnout: Institutional Symptom and Individual Pain

58:35 • 7min

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Renewing Desire in Care Work

01:05:41 • 5min

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Ethics, Groups, and Limits of Expansion

01:10:56 • 4min

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Speaking the Unsaid in Community Settings

Elizabeth Ann Danto's 'Freud's Free Clinics' traces the emergence and evolution of psychoanalytic free clinics in the interwar period, situating them within broader social justice movements. The book explores how clinicians sought to make psychoanalytic care accessible amid social upheaval and political change. Danto analyzes institutional strategies, ideological debates, and the clinical practices that characterized these clinics. Her work highlights tensions between outreach ideals and professionalization pressures that shaped psychoanalysis's public presence. The study illuminates historical precedents for contemporary community psychoanalytic initiatives.

The question of lay analysis

Sigmund Freud

In 'The Question of Lay Analysis' Freud defends the possibility and legitimacy of analysis by those without medical degrees, addressing professional and institutional objections. He examines specific cases and articulates a principle that analytic aptitude can be certified through demonstrated clinical work and supervision rather than strict medical credentials. The essay historicized debates about professionalization and training that shaped psychoanalytic institutions across countries. Freud's arguments influenced later discussions about accessibility and who may practice psychoanalysis. The piece remains foundational for debates over lay vs. medical control of analytic training.

Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Emily A. Kuriloff

Emily Kuriloff's work examines how the traumatic history of the Third Reich influenced the trajectories of psychoanalytic institutions and practitioners in the postwar era. Through archival research and interviews, she documents the experiences of refugee analysts and the institutional choices they made in exile. The book addresses how these histories impacted theoretical orientations, professionalization, and silences around collective trauma. Kuriloff situates psychoanalysis within broader sociopolitical forces that shaped its reception and adaptation in different national contexts. Her analysis helps explain enduring institutional dynamics and debates within contemporary psychoanalytic practice.

#23196

• Mentioned in 2 episodes

The Psychoanalysis of Fire

Gaston BACHELARD

Gaston Bachelard's "The Psychoanalysis of Fire" delves into the profound and multifaceted relationship between humanity and fire. Bachelard explores fire's symbolic and psychological significance, tracing its impact on human imagination, culture, and philosophical thought. He examines how our experiences with fire, from childhood to adulthood, shape our understanding of the world. The book analyzes fire's role in mythology, literature, and the arts, revealing its enduring power as a source of both fascination and fear. Bachelard's work offers a rich and insightful exploration of fire's complex nature, highlighting its capacity to both create and destroy.

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

Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, Community Psychoanalysis Certificate Program

Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Concentration in Community Psychoanalysis

DIVISION/Review, Special Issue on Community Psychoanalysis, 2022

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:

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