Towards a Psychoanalytic Concept of Community (I): Consideration of Current Concepts

Abstract

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.

Supervisory Experiences and Their Context

“…Notwithstanding the analytic community's centrality for therapy and supervision, the analytic literature has not devoted much effort to studying the community's structural and procedural components or the unconscious forces activated within them through its well-established concepts and methods of investigation. The limited literature that has relevance to the concept of community has been written mainly from the point of view of therapeutic communities (Koh and Twemlow, 2016), but not from the perspective of individuals' unconscious processes with the communities' concrete and symbolic aspects. Thus, for example, there are hardly any studies of unconscious motivations, conflicts, or enactments of members toward their communities as transferential manifestations, most likely stemming from the evocation of internalizations of the community members' families of origin in early childhood.…”

Towards a psychoanalytic concept of community (III): A proposal

“…It also included the residents' perception of others' evaluation of community life. This perspective builds on the concept of community described by Sarason () and McMillan and Chavis () which focus on the individual's sense of community (as discussed in our first paper, Koh & Twemlow, ).…”

“…In the first paper of this series, we looked – through a psychoanalytic lens – at common conceptualizations of “community” from philosophical, sociological and ecological perspectives (Koh & Twemlow, ). In so doing, we highlighted how applied psychoanalysis could usefully add another dimension to an understanding of communities.…”

Towards a psychoanalytic concept of community (IV): The well‐functioning community

“…This paper is the fourth in a series to develop a psychoanalytic concept of community (Koh & Twemlow, , ). In the third paper of the series, we proposed a concept that centered on the unconscious psychological tasks involved, firstly, in creating a community and ensuring its continuity, and secondly, in achieving its aim or reason for existence.…”