Community Psychoanalysis: Knotting Us Together or Burning Out Again? Discussion of Almas Merchant’s “The Disaster of Not Being Found: The Paradox of Psychoanalytic Training”

This discussion of Almas Merchant’s case investigates the metaphor Merchant uses for shared identification with her patient, being “knotted together.” It considers the potential for overuse of, and romanticization of, identification, including presumptions about “community” in community psychoanalysis. It calls for interrogating normative, unmarked forms of psychoanalysis that do not get the euphemistic designation of being “community” psychoanalysis. It relates these current tensions to similar tensions present in the 1970s with the emergence of the concept of burnout in the free clinic movement, as experienced and reported by psychoanalyst Herbert Freudenberger. It concludes by considering future possibilities by looking at the work of mutual aid group Bronx Móvil and pointing toward community psychoanalysis’ potential engagement with community organizing.