Our Events
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 6
This is the 6th meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Future meeting dates:
April 30, 2025
The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!
Psychoanalysis has been a long-contested site within queer and transgender scholarship, as it has notoriously advanced some of the most explicitly pathologizing approaches to non-normative gendered and sexual psychic lives. Yet psychoanalysis has also enduringly captured the attention of diversely situated politicized and liberatory theorists. These thinkers have laboured to subvert its otherwise repressive applications, moving psychoanalysis outside of dogmatic clinical realms to explore its more expansive social uses.
Join a panel of trans clinicians and psychoanalytic theorists at a NYC launch for a new collected volume, The Queerness of Psychoanalysis. Panelists will present their chapters from the volume, followed by a discussion on the past, present, and future of the field for transgender analysts. We will consider what clinical psychoanalysis may accomplish if it is put squarely and unapologetically into transgender people’s hands. The panelists will address topics most pertinent to trans people’s psychological survival within our current cultural climate, including self-articulations of trans childhood, the systemic exclusion of practicing trans clinicians, and the psychological formations of transphobia. In so doing we may overturn our shared psychoanalytic cis-tuation and contribute to a more pluralistic field.
In person presentations planned by volume co-editor Myriam Sauer, and contributors Griffin Hansbury, Tobias Wiggins, and M. E. O’Brien.
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage.
This event is sponsored by Pulsion Institute.
Pulsion, the International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, is an institute in New York City offering a Certificate Training Program in Psychoanalysis, LP-Qualifying. Its mission embraces a psychoanalytic theory and technique built on the foundation of the economic model of Freud's theories of the drives, language, and the Other meeting the demands of cultural evolution. Pulsion aims to foster a deep appreciation for the unconscious, for the Other that resides within. Because this Otherness resists domestication, Pulsion places equal emphasis on the subject as an individual and the subject who is part of a social fabric, especially the ways in which the social has failed individuals.
BIOS:
Myriam Sauer (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Latin‑America Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, as well as a writer and poet. Her first novel, entitled Passage durch den reißenden Strom (A Torrential Passage), came out in Fall 2023 with Querverlag. She recently edited, alongside Elisabeth Punzi and Vanessa Sinclair, the collected volume, The Queerness of Psychoanalysis. Her primary academic interests lie in the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology, queer studies, literature, and philosophy.
Griffin Hansbury, LCSW‑R (he/him) is a psychoanalyst in practice since 2001. As an internationally recognized expert on trans identity, he was the first psychoanalyst to widely publish as openly transsexual. His writing on the subject has advanced the field, appearing in several peer‑reviewed journals, including The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, The Psychoanalytic Review, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. His article “The Masculine Vaginal: Working With Queer Men’s Embodiment at the Transgender Edge” has been translated and published in several countries, including Argentina, Germany, and Italy. He is also the author of several books, including Vanishing New York and Feral City, under his pen name Jeremiah Moss, and the novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In. He lives in New York City.
M.E. O’Brien, PhD, LCSW (she/her) is a practicing analytic clinician in New York City. She has two books, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care (Pluto Press, 2023), and the co‑authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is also on the editorial collective at Pinko, a magazine on gay communism. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City’s LGBTQ social movements. She is currently a psychotherapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and in formation as an analyst. She is a candidate at Pulsion, a psychoanalytic institute in New York City.
Tobias Wiggins, PhD (he/him) is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (AU) in Alberta, in Canada. His research specializations include transgender mental health and sexuality, psychoanalysis, research-creation, queer visual culture, and cisgender psychology. Broadly, Wiggins’ work aims to address the continued pathologization of gender diversity and advocate for trans-competent care. His recent scholarly outputs include contributions to significant trans anthologies likeThe Queerness of Psychoanalysis(2024), Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care(2023), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities(2020); journals including Studies in Gender and Sexuality(2022), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child(2021), and Transgender Studies Quarterly(2020);as well as well as community-based publication projects and digital storytelling.
From Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis w/ Danielle Knafo
Dr. Knafo, who has worked with psychosis in a variety of settings for over 40 years, will describe the reasons why she believes most psychoanalysts have veered away from the treatment of psychosis in recent decades. She will then present her approach to meeting the challenges of working with individuals undergoing extreme states. Her approach focuses primarily on providing safety, forging a working alliance by meeting the patient where they are and allotting them maximum personal agency, understanding their symptoms as attempts at adaptation and restoration of the self, coping with loneliness, and working with the transference and countertransference. She works with a patient's strengths as well as weaknesses. Most importantly, Dr. Knafo's approach to therapy involves viewing the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms, prioritizing subjective experience and affect, and seeing the patient as a true collaborator in their own treatment. Clinical examples will illustrate her points.
Dr. Danielle Knafo is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with expertise in the treatment of psychosis. During her tenure as professor at L.I.U.’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program for 22 years, she trained doctoral students on how to work therapeutically and psychodynamically with serious mental illness. She received the prestigious Barbro Sandin award for this work. Currently, she is faculty and supervisor at Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs and NYU’s Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written and lectured extensively on the topics of art and creativity, psychoanalysis, trauma and psychosis, sexuality and technology. From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis is her tenth book. Dr. Knafo has worked psychodynamically with psychosis for 40 years, and she maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, NY.
* * *
Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.
Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles w/ Neil Gong
This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public safety net providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in jail, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts medication refusal and drug use so long as undesired behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, I show how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and control a form of privilege.
Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (University of Chicago Press 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (OxfordUniversity Press 2020). Neil's public writings have appeared in such venues as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times.
* * *
Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 7
This is the 7th meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Insight for All: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness w/ Deborah Anna Luepnitz + Elizabeth Ann Danto
This presentation challenges the assumption that psychoanalysis is relevant only to people of means by referring both to Freud's free clinics and to Winnicott's work with homeless children. We will proceed to a discussion of IFA (Insight For All)—a group in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year, that connects analysts with adults who are, or have been, street homeless. A relational framework leaning on Winnicott's concepts will be used while making room for important insights from the work of Jacques Lacan. Caring for marginalized people can have the positive effect of unsettling psychoanalytic theories and expanding them for our time. Clinical material will be offered to illustrate the meaning of several types of homelessness.
Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. She has taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for over 30 years. She is the author of 3 books, including: The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: 5 Stories of Psychotherapy, which has been translated into 7 languages. She was a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Dr. Luepnitz is the founder of Insight For All, which connects psychoanalysts with homeless and formerly homeless adults. In 2013, she was given the Distinguished Educator Award by the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She maintains a private practice in Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.
Livability Against Ashlaa’ w/ Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Ashlaa’ as an analytic illuminates the textures of Palestinian life and death, and perhaps more accurately life in death. Parallel to the material work of excavating the pieces of our Palestinian flesh from beneath the rubble, the talk will engage with new epistemological spaces excavated by Gazans when and while creating life, knowledge, and new humanity. Thinking through ashlaa is thinking against the carceral logic of the colonizer, and making a break in the colonizer’s system. It is thinking of the wholeness of Palestine against Tashlea’ (cutting the body to pieces) and acting actively to rupture the genocidal logic.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian- a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonialstate’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London, Professor Extraordinarius- University of South Africa, Visiting Professor- Princeton University, and Professor emeritus- the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Cambridge University Press 2019); co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.
The Repetition of Trauma in the Psychiatric Setting w/ Elan Cohen
As Paul Racamier observed, psychiatric institutions are vulnerable to a reversal in their therapeutic purpose, sometimes adopting the symptoms they aim to treat. Other stakeholders have noted that psychiatric services can be retraumatizing, duplicating the forms of suffering that are embedded in symptoms of madness and trauma on a massive scale. What insights can psychoanalysis offer to disrupt the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services? Embracing a history of psychoanalytic thought, this talk critiques prevailing biopolitical approaches and reimagines therapeutic practice to honor the dignity and subjectivity of persons with psychosis. Drawing from Freud, Ferenczi, Bion, and Lacan, the presentation advocates for clinical approaches that focus on the relationship between the subject of psychosis and the social link. By locating the etiology of psychiatric suffering in traumatic human relationships, attacks on linking, or foreclosure from the symbolic order, we might have a better chance at addressing the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services.
Elan Cohen holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University, where he researched the intersections of historical trauma and psychosis through the lenses of biopolitics and psychoanalysis. Since 2012, his clinical experience has included community mental health programs, state psychiatric centers, city hospitals, and outpatient clinics. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Ethical Human Psychiatry and Psychology, and Psychosis. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Soho Psychoanalytic, where he works with adolescents and adults of all ages, identities, and socio-cultural backgrounds.
* * *
Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 5
This is the 5th meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Future meeting dates:
March 26, 2025
April 30, 2025
Psychotherapy and Materialism: Tosquelles, Oury, and Radical Psychiatry
How can care and cure practices counter the homogenizing policies of institutions? Can the work of healing go beyond the neoliberal economy of individual well-being? This evening will explore the legacies of institutional psychotherapy, a movement of psychiatric reform and resistance that emerged in postwar France in response to the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. Initiated at Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital by a collective of Marxist psychiatrists, activists, philosophers, and nuns from the Saint-Régis community, Jewish refugees and surrealist artists, the movement embraced group therapies and patient-run cooperatives.
The publication of Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury (ICI Berlin Press, 2024) edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman, offers the first English translation of two seminal texts by institutional psychotherapy co-inventors François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist and anarcho-syndicalist, and Jean Oury, founder of the La Borde clinic. Navigating dialectical materialism, Tosquelles critically dismantles the stasis of biological and nosological categories in psychiatry in favor of a relational science anchored in social praxis. Oury highlights the principles developed by institutional psychotherapy, from the creation of spaces inside the hospital that allow for the ‘freedom of circulation’ to the transversality of care and its connection to other social and pedagogical movements. Tosquelles’ and Oury’s ‘disalienationist’ approach was further developed in Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis. It led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work promoted by figures like Gisela Pankow, Anne Querrien, and Ginette Michaud.
The panelists will discuss the published texts alongside legacies of institutional psychotherapy today, involving contemporary experiences from psychoanalysis and mental healthcare at Fountain House and The Greene Clinic.
Participants:
Elena Vogman is a writer, media theorist and Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar.
Perwana Nazif is the Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at Parapraxis. She is currently organizing a solo exhibition of François Pain’s video essays on institutional psychotherapy at JOAN in Los Angeles.
Christopher Landry a community psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in practice in New York City. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community for people living with serious mental illness, and a co-founder of the Greene Clinic’s Constellation Program, which adapts the methods of institutional psychotherapy to contemporary outpatient practice.
Chloe Murtagh and Jesse Newberg will also be joining from Fountain House. They are social practitioners at Fountain House and labor organizers with the Fountain House Workers Union.
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 4
This is the 4th meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Future meeting dates:
February 26, 2025
March 26, 2025
April 30, 2025
Greene Clinic’s Winter Melancholia Film Series: Parallel Mothers
The folks from Greene Clinic are hosting the 2nd event in their Winter Melancholia Film Series with a showing of Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) by Pedro Almodóvar.
To RSVP, please email Sophia Frydman at sophiafrydman@gmail.com.
Belacqua-Syndrome w/ Sasha Warren: The Political Economy of Psychiatry
Year after year, everyone from major psychiatric organizations to politicians and major news outlets sounds the alarm about an apparent crisis in the American mental health care system, usually after a high-profile exposé at an institution or act of violence involving a psychiatric patient. Despite the fact that all parties seem to agree that something must be done, despite flashy new laws and expensive programs rolled out in the major cities, despite the supposed reduction in stigma faced by psychiatric service-users, nothing substantial seems to change. Those diagnosed with a serious mental illness continue to die earlier, are killed more often, many live in poverty, struggle to find work and housing, and are often isolated from their peers. A 'crisis' implies decision, a choice that makes a difference. In truth, there is at present no crisis in mental health services, but only a long, withering death rattle and an inability to change in the face of intolerable conditions. This talk will argue that the mental health system's perpetual deferment of crisis can best be explained with reference to its role within the US economy. Every psychiatric service encounter is conditional on being effectively funded. Who pays for these services and why? This talk will map out a possible answer to this question through exploring the historical relationship between mental illness and labor, the funding streams into psychiatry, psychiatry's function in the economy, and the composition of the mental health labor force.
Sasha Warren is a writer and mental health worker living in Minneapolis. He writes on psychiatric history, policy, and law on his substack Of Unsound Mind. In March, 2024, he released his first book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt on the history of revolutionary and reactionary psychiatry with Common Notions. He is the cofounder of various projects focused on mental health: the Minnesota chapter of the International Society for Social and Psychological Approaches to Psychosis, the Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry, and Hearing Voices Twin Cities.
* * *
Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 3
This is the 3rd meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Pre-Reads:
“The ‘Grid’” by Félix Guattari
“Medicalizing Society” by Danielle Carr
Future meeting dates:
January 29, 2025
February 26, 2025
March 26, 2025
April 30, 2025
Psychiatry for Internal Colonialism w/ Kevin Duong: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic
This lecture surveys the experimental anti colonial politics and diagnostic techniques undertaken at Harlem's Lafargue Clinic from 1946-1958. Named after Karl Marx’s son-in-law and the author of Le Droit à la paresse, the clinic operated out of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and treated patients free of charge. Its mission was as radical as it was simple: psychoanalysis and psychiatric care should be available to anyone and everyone. Those damaged by the color line and those who were poor deserved, as much as anyone else, treatment for their neuroses. Internationally famous at the time, the clinic has yet to receive the attention it deserves from intellectual historians, even though its history is ripe with clues for understanding what it means to “decolonize the mind” in conditions of extraordinary economic duress and spatial segregation. What does psychic repair look like when the wound is as wide and deep as racism itself? What happens to the clinical encounter when neither clinic nor patient has any money? Can improving individual psyches do anything to mitigate collective structures of domination? These questions guided Lafargue Clinic’s psychotherapeutic techniques and compelled its theorist-clinicians, many involved with the aesthetic avant-garde and international communism, to theorize “self-rule” anew for the psyche and the social world.
Kevin Duong teaches modern intellectual history and political thought at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France as well as numerous articles on revolutionary theory and political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a book, Freud Against Empire: An Experimental History, which maps how an international cohort of midcentury radicals—Surrealist poets, painters, ethnographers, psychiatrists, and communists in France, Martinique, Cuba, and the United States—deployed psychoanalysis to undermine civilizational and global hierarchies.
* * *
Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.
Working Group on Community Mental Health - Meeting 2
This is the 2nd meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Pre-Reads:
“François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy” from Disalienation by Camille Robcis
“A Politics of Madness” by Francois Tosquelles — Linking to the PDF version as well
Future meeting dates:
December 18, 2024
January 29, 2025
February 26, 2025
March 26, 2025
April 30, 2025
[VIRTUAL ONLY] Working Group on Community Mental Health
This is a special session for those who cannot make the in-person meetings of the Working Group. Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome. Sign up here!
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Suggested Pre-Read - “The Risk of Space: Toward a Treatment of Psychosis in the City” by Loren Dent and Matthew Oyer
TO JOIN THE MEETING ON 11/13:
Zoom Link: https://columbiacuimc.zoom.us/j/93350560724?pwd=1TnMHGLXQMgKApWp3C71o7FaoMSa38.1
Meeting ID: 933 5056 0724
Passcode: 4129
The Nero Complex: Colonial Presents, Fascist Futures
This talk will revisit the Albert Memmi’s proposal in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1950) that the psychic life of the settler-colonist can be usefully interpreted and allegorized as the ‘usurper’s role,’ understood, following Racine’s tragedy Britannicus, in terms of a libidinal mechanism whereby ‘disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time.
Nero, the typical model of a usurper, is thus brought to persecute Britannicus savagely and to pursue him. But the more he hurts him, the more he coincides with the atrocious role he has chosen for himself.’ Before Memmi made it into a pivotal element of his portrait of the colonizer, in 1946 the film critic and theorist André Bazin had used the expression ‘Nero complex’ to refer to ‘the pleasure experienced at the sight of urban destruction.’ Keeping in mind the criticisms that were levied by Frantz Fanon at Memmi, as well as at Octave Mannoni, for downplaying the significance of colonialism as a system of political-economic violence, I want to explore what it might mean to revisit the Nero Complex as a name not just for a pathology of subjectivation but for the psychic life of state power. I will bring Memmi’s formulations into critical dialogue with contemporary psychoanalytically informed analyses of colonial domination, including Abdaljawad Omar’s analysis of the ‘shock without awe,’ which anatomize Israeli military violence against the Palestinians (and now the Lebanese), while also tracing the connections between the thesis of a colonial ‘Nero Complex’ and the analyses of what Deleuze and Guattari called fascism’s ‘line of pure destruction and abolition.’
Alberto Toscano teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is the author of Fanaticism, Terms of Disorder and Late Fascism, and co-editor of Georges Bataille, Critical Essays. He is the series editor of Seagull Essays and the Italian List for Seagull Books, and a contributing writer for In These Times.
Working Group on Community Mental Health
The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.
We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.
The Working Group will have its organizational meeting at 6pm on Wednesday October 30th at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.
The rest of the calendar will be posted soon, but all meetings will be held on Wednesdays at 6pm.
The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.
Suggested Pre-Read - “The Risk of Space: Toward a Treatment of Psychosis in the City” by Loren Dent and Matthew Oyer
Communities and Pain
Free and open-to-all, this event will explore pain in the community from a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view. Pain lies at the core of human experience even if one never encounters trauma. The life of everyone is punctuated by painful transitions and losses over time. Pain is enigmatic and often speaks without words; it inhabits at the intersection of body and mind, and self and other.
Can psychoanalysis create therapeutic spaces in community settings to address pain and its disruptions? How do frozen emotions and, especially, suppressed rage and hate link to pain? As Aeschylus states, pathei mathos, we learn through suffering. What can we learn from pain?
These and many other questions will be addressed by our guest from the Paris Psychoanalytic society and the Psychosomatic school of Paris, Panos Aloupis, as well as by Patricia Gherovici and Vaia Tsolas as they share their experiences addressing pain while working psychoanalytically in community settings.
Panos Aloupis, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist, psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Paris, France. He is a full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), correspondent member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society (HPS), training and supervising member of the Paris Psychosomatic Institute (IPSO Pierre Marty), member of the editorial committee of the Revue française de Psychosomatique, and faculty member of Pulsion Institute. His last paper is titled “Enemies of unpleasure in A psychoanalytic exploration of the contemporary search for pleasure” (Routledge, 2023).
Patricia Gherovici, PhD, is a recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She is a trustee at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference . She co-authored with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize) She edited with Manya Steinkoler Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't ; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award).
Vaia Tsolas, PhD is co-founder, president and director of the Pulsion Institute, the International Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is in training at the Paris School of Psychosomatics (IPSO). She is co-founder of Rose Hill Psychological, a mental health center in New York City and the Bronx since 2006 and the project director of RHPS pain center. Dr. Tsolas is the author of many articles on the feminine, the body and otherness. She edited with Christine Anzieu-Premmereur “The Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today’s World” (Routledge, 2017) and “a Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure” (Routledge, 2023).
What is Community Psychoanalysis?
We welcome clinicians, educators, and organizations to our inaugural conference.
We will begin to envision how to advance this emerging discourse and praxis, and how to create generative encounters with psychoanalytic institutions, community mental health organizations, and community members.