The results suggest that exhibitions can successfully promote mental health literacy and contribute to positive attitudes towards people with experience of mental illness. This paper explores these findings and raises questions about how the presentation of artworks in an exhibition influences their effectiveness in mental health promotion.

Community" is a word that is used frequently in everyday exchanges and, increasingly, in public policies and government funding strategies. Mental health promotion campaigns strongly promote "community-focused" initiatives. The predominant discourse on the topic of "community" has been from socio-political perspectives. Very little has been written specifically about the nature of communities, or their psychodynamics, from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper, the first of three, considers three major conceptualizations of communitiesphilosophical, sociological and ecologicalfrom a psychoanalytic perspective. Within this paradigm, a community, unless arbitrarily defined, is as much a subjective notion as it is an objective entity. Psychoanalysis has much to add to the current thinking on this subject by adding a description of its dynamic qualities, and highlighting the subjective experience (both individual and collective, conscious and unconscious) of communities.

In the first of three papers the current philosophical, sociological and ecological approaches to "community" were considered from a psychoanalytic perspective. This second paper aims to arrive at a set of principles that will underpin a psychoanalytic concept of communities. Those principles include: psychoanalytic understandings of groups; the unconscious of the collective; the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of individuals and collectives; the symbolic function of an abstract concept; and the processes involved in making sense, such as mentalization and symbolization. The emerging psychoanalytic framework conceptualizes communities in terms of their collective psychological tasks, such as the maintenance of shared identification and boundaries, their responses to trauma and the work of mourning, rather than by their geographical or sociological characteristics. This new approach to the concept of community also highlights the utility of distinguishing the nature of groups by their respective, collective psychological tasks.

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The phrase “back of house” often refers to art gallery processes that are rarely seen by visitors. These include the processes of acquisition, cataloging, conservation, the development and production of exhibitions, and the planning of related public programs. This paper proposes that a psychoanalytic consideration of “back of house” art gallery processes can provide important insights into the nature of trauma that is manifested through creative efforts. It explores some of the psychoanalytic aspects of a unique project concerning the art by survivors of the Holocaust. It highlights transgenerational trauma and how a thoughtful process of acquisition and exhibition can facilitate the working through of a collectively painful experience in a traumatized community. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.