Featuring Paula Kliger, Brian Ngo-Smith, Zak Mucha, Lee Slome, Nancy Burke, Patricia Gherovici, Daniel Gaztambide, Hannah Zeavin, Kazembe Balagun, Elizabeth Danto, Ben Kafka, Jamieson Webster, Almas Merchant, and Jordan Dunn.
We welcome clinicians, educators, and organizations to our inaugural conference: What is Community Psychoanalysis?
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.
Breakfast and lunch will be served.
TICKET SALES HAVE ENDED.
Paula Kliger
Paula Christian-Kliger, PhD, ABPP as Associate Head of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE) of American Psychoanalytic Association (APSA), she is a Founder/member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and recently obtained Harvard University, The John F Kennedy School’s Public Leadership Credential (PLC). She is North America Region Representative of IPA, The Community and the World Committee: Prejudice, Discrimination & Racism (PDR). As Board-Certified psychologist and a psychoanalyst who founded PsychAssets and Kliger Consulting Group 35+ years ago, her diverse clinical work is with children/adults/families, teaching/seminars/presentations, and she consults to C-Suite leadership in multi-national contexts, family businesses, universities and other nonprofit organizations/communities. She developed a Self-Study Group Reflective Practice in Transformational Change, and in Crisis, Disaster, and Trauma Recovery. Dr. Kliger is recognized for her assessments/research; and, for her award-winning book of illustrations and poetry, as producer of the docu-educational film: We Are Human First, and for earning the 2020 Hermes International Creative Gold Award for the podcast of the same name. She served as Chair, APSA/DPE Section: The Psychoanalyst in the Community, Inaugural Board President/Chair, Harlem Family Services, and Principal Consultant, Harlem Family Institute. Dr. Kliger is member of International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations and APA, DIV 39.
Brian Ngo-Smith
Brian Ngo-Smith is a psychoanalyst and clinical social worker located in Denver, CO. He received his MSW from the University of Iowa and completed post-graduate training at the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he is now on faculty. He has worked in the mental health field for over 20 years, first in residential and hospital settings and later as Director of Adult Intensive Services at Aurora Mental Health Center, before moving into private practice in 2018. Brian is a Past President of the Colorado Society for Clinical Social Work and the immediate Past President of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work. His paper, “This Couch Has Bed Bugs: On the Psychoanalysis of Homelessness and the Homelessness of Psychoanalysis,” published in the Clinical Social Work Journal in 2018, was presented at the 2023 Sue Fairbanks Lecture in Psychoanalytic Knowledge at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also on faculty. Brian delivered the 2024 Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Memorial Lecture at the National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association with his paper, “Porosity and Preoccupation: Queer Thoughts on Psychoanalytic Care.”
Patricia Gherovici
Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities.
She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), Honorary Member at IPTAR the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City, and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen, co-founder and trustee Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York.
Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Winner of the Gradiva® Award and the Boyer Prize; Other Press: 2003.) Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge: 2017).
She published with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Winner of the Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Collection and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; Routledge: 2019.) She edited with Manya Steinkoler Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't ( Routledge: 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Winner of the Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Collection; Routledge: 2023), and the Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Gender (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025.)
Zak Mucha
Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. He is the author of Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work as well as the poetry collection, The Ambulatorium.
Lee Slome
Lee Slome PhD is a Personal and Supervising Analyst, Community Psychoanalysis Supervising Analyst, and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), where she serves on the Community Psychoanalysis Track (CPT) Steering Committee. She is a member of APsA’s Department of Psychoanalytic Education, Psychoanalyst in the Community committee and hosted a community psychoanalysis pre-Congress workshop at the 2023 IPA Congress. She facilitates collaborative groups with Bay Area and international community organizations, and works in her Oakland private practice with adults, couples and groups.
Nancy Burke
Nancy Burke is currently the co-chair of Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago, NFP, which oversees two psychoanalytically-oriented, community-owned clinics, the Kedzie Center and LoSAH Center of Hope/Centro de Esperanza. She is a past-president of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, of which she is a graduate and core faculty member, and is the chair of its committee to establish a community psychoanalysis training track within its analytic program. In addition, she is the Vice-President of ISPS-US, a board member of RAYO Community Co-Op, and a co-convener of the 606 Project, an incubator of efforts to create treatment opportunities for people experiencing extreme states.
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor whose work largely revolves around the history of the psy-ences. She is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021), Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (2025), both with The MIT Press. She is now at work on her third book, All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance for Penguin Press. In 2021, Zeavin founded The Psychosocial Foundation and the new magazine, Parapraxis in Oakland, California.
Jamieson Webster
Jamieson Webster is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York where she works with children, adolescents, and adults. She teaches at The New School for Social Research and is on the board and faculty of Pulsion Institute for Psychoanalysis, as well as, a founding member of Das Unbehagen, an organization that explores psychoanalysis outside of an institutional or organizational framework. She has written for Apology, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, as well as, for many psychoanalytic publications. The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, is published with Routledge (2011). Stay, Illusion!- written with Simon Critchley- is published with Pantheon Books (2013), Conversion Disorder is published with Columbia University Press (2018), and Disorganisation and Sex is published with Divided Press (2022). On Breathing is forthcoming with Catapult (2025).
Elizabeth Danto
Elizabeth Ann Danto, PhD, is professor Emeritus at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include the prize-winning “Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938,” “Freud/Tiffany – Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School” and the forthcoming "Theory Has Its Pleasures - the Work of Anna Freud." She is co-editor of this Fall's special issue on Community Psychoanalysis for Psychoanalytic Social Work. Formerly a consulting curator at the Freud Museum London, Dr. Danto’s work as a writer and international lecturer has become a standard reference in progressive psychoanalysis and its social history.
Ben Kafka
Ben Kafka is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich Village. He serves on the clinical faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and the research faculty of DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. Originally trained as a historian, Kafka is interested in how the external world works its way into our minds, including the roles of both interpersonal and impersonal forces. He's the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012) as well as several dozen articles, essays, and reviews. Over the years he has also been affiliated with the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study; the New York Institute for the Humanities; and NYU, where he was tenured faculty of the history and theory of communication.
Almas (Ally) Merchant
Dr. Almas (Ally) Merchant is a psychoanalytic candidate at NYU Postdoc who works with children, adolescents, adults, families, and intimate partners at Stress and Trauma Evaluation and Psychological Services. Ally strives to help patients engender curiosity within themselves about their mind and their unconscious motivations. Ally's clinical thinking is influenced not only by psychoanalysis but also by interdisciplinary critical theory and the impact of culture and history on her patients' psychological development. Besides her clinical work, Ally provides supervision and mentorship to newer clinicians as well as consultation and education around equity, diversity, and inclusion to organizations and clinicians to become more intentional around providing inclusionary and liberatory care. She also currently serves as Council Representative to the American Psychological Association for Division 39, Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology and as co-chair for the global issues and global human rights caucus on council. Finally, she is a co-host for Couched, a podcast for learning from and listening to conversations between psychoanalysts, artists, and change makers who are knitting together communities.
Daniel Gaztambide
Daniel José Gaztambide, PsyD, is assistant professor of psychology at Queens College, where he is the director of the Frantz Fanon Lab for Decolonial Psychology. He is the author of the books A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Liberation Psychology, and the recent Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Technique: Putting Freud on Fanon’s Couch. He is in analytic training at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the recipient of multiple fellowships including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship and a Miranda Family Fellowship for his research on colonial mentality and the application of psychoanalytic treatment to diverse populations. His recent work, “Standing against racial capitalism: Reconsidering psychology’s role in dismantling systemic racism,” was published in a recent special issue in American Psychologist on addressing racism in psychology. This work is an extension of his service as a Taskforce member at the APA’s Taskforce on Strategies for the Elimination of Racism, Discrimination, and Hate, for which he received a presidential citation for his work.