Carlos Padron The Mangrove Notebook

in the shadows so as to avoid being ostracized by managed healthcare models, and many others who provide low-fee therapy on a oneoff basis in private practices. For example, the Kedzie Center in Chicago is partly funded by local taxpayer dollars, and the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn has a robust private group practice model of sliding scale fees to make it possible to serve the community broadly. Deborah Luepnitz (2008) has written about her work with homeless and very poor individuals as well as the super-rich in Philadelphia. Freud’s Free Clinics were supported as part of an accepted social progressivism; today, we find more of these offerings connected to religious charities or societies that tend toward sharing social burdens that therefore resolve some of the issues around funding. In the United States, we find ourselves at a crossroads of needing to do things outside of the consulting room to change what can happen inside of it.

The particular realities of classist divisions take our work beyond the individual. The psyche is interpersonal and relational, put upon with identifications from the social-historical realm, which affect who has access to care and what constitutes that care. If we truly want to work in the complexity of individuals, it behooves us to work toward expanded governmental and social support for therapies of depth and parity in psychological healthcare. We have all been variously afflicted and privileged by what happens at the social level of engagement. And we have the benefit of trauma survivors, including Holocaust survivor analysts, to know the limits of what happens when social impact is only privately held or dissociated. In this new tumultuous time, we have more tools to envision the psyche and therapeutic engagement as also part of a social collective.

Class divisions have too starkly defined what is possible in psychoanalysis and who can access it since World War II. Seeing now that our minds are built around lack as well as excess, the maternal gift economy suggests that we have more to give than we realize. As analysts, we are uniquely attuned professionally to interpersonal need, and must therefore create a structure of care, financially and psychologically, that is consistent with seeing and meeting such need. It is possible to operate from a place of our own emotional security and attunement to create models of community alive in the collective unconscious, to be leaders in living a gift economy forward. If meaning and value are fundamentally inherent in each one of us, let us find a way to restore our recognition of value there. z

REFERENCES

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Danto, E. (2005). Freud’s free clinics. Columbia University Press.

Davar, B. D. (1999). Indian psychoanalysis, patriarchy and Hinduism. Anthropology & Medicine, 6(2), 173-193.

Freud, S. (1961). The future of an illusion. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 21, pp.1–56). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1927)

Fuchsman, K. (2022). Psychoanalytic responses to the Holocaust [Review of the book Contemporary psychoanalysis and the legacy of the Third Reich, by E. A. Kuriloff]. The Journal of Psychohistory, 49(4), 313-318.

Grotstein, J. S. (1981). Wilfred R. Bion: The man, the psychoanalyst, the mystic. A perspective on his life and work. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 17, 501-536.

Kanwal, G. S. (2021). More than simply human: Intersectionality in psychoanalytic theory, practice, and establishment. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 57, 270-305.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Layton, L. (2020). Toward a social psychoanalysis: Culture, character, and normative unconscious processes. Subjectivity, 13, 235–242.

Luepnitz, D. A. (2008). Schopenhauer’s porcupines: Intimacy and its dilemmas. Basic Books.

O’Loughlin, M. (2020). Whiteness and the psychoanalytic imagination. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 56(4), 1-22.

Philipson, I. (2017). Fearing the theoretical other: The legacy of Kohut’s erasure of the analyst’s trauma. Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, 12, 211-220.

Stoute, B. J. (2017). Race and racism in psychoanalytic thought: The ghosts in our nursery. The American Psychoanalyst, 51(1).

Sidesinger, T. (2021). The feminine yes: Return me to excess. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 22(1), 4-15.

Simard, S. (2021). Finding the mother tree: Discovering the wisdom of the forest. Alfred A. Knopf.

Stovall, N. (2019, August 12). Whiteness on the couch. Longreads. https://longreads.com/2019/08/12/ whiteness-on-the-couch/

Vaughan, G. (2015). The gift in the heart of language: The maternal source of meaning. Mimesis International.

Vaughan, G. (Ed.) (2019). The maternal roots of the gift economy. Inanna Publications & Education Inc. (Original work published 2017) Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How indigenous thinking can save the world. HarperOne. Zong, A. (2021). Dreaming identity in the space between Bion and Lacan. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Open - Open Peer Review and Debate, 8, 1-31.

The Mangrove Notebook Carlos PADRÓN

Community

1. Jean-Luc Nancy says that the individual is the residue of the erosion of community.

2. Nancy argues that two things negate community: l the idea of an individual that is taken to be the point of departure of the common which decays into the atomization and privatization of experience (liberal, capitalist democracies) l the idea of a fused collective body, which results in undifferentiation (real communisms).

Against these “betrayals of community,” he poses the thought that being in common has nothing to do with communion or individuals gathering to participate in a group of shared interests or characteristics.

Historically, these forms of organization have been based on a substantial, fixed identity of either the individual or the collective; the outcome has been different forms of totalitarian societies (past Soviet communism or contemporary fascist capitalism, for example). This phenomenon is what Édouard Glissant calls the “totalitarian drive of a single, unique root.”

Roberto Esposito says that thinking about community is today more necessary than ever given the “failure of all communisms” and “the misery of new individualisms.”

3. Esposito asserts that community is not a “wider subjectivity” or a “unity of unities.” He says that this idea stems from a concept of the subject as absolute unity and interiority. Community, according to this perspective, is therefore a “property belonging to subjects that join them together: an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality, or as a substance that is produced by their union.” The subject, individual or collective, taken to be “full” or “whole,” produces a notion of community as that which reflects “what is most properly our own.” Normally, this is related to some definition of the human or of humanity (language, territory, etc.) In this sense, through community we gather what is most common to all of us and “communicate what is most properly our own.” Community, according to this thinking, which Esposito criticizes, is related to the proper, to property and to appropriation.

4. But if the common is that which unites the varied properties of the members of a community, then they must all have in common what is most properly their own. Esposito says, “they are the owners of what is common to them all.” The most proper (my own) is what is most improper (not my own). This is the starting point of a new thinking of community.

5. The common is not characterized by what is proper but by what is improper, by what pertains to more than one: what is public or general in contrast to what is private and individual, says Esposito. That which is common, public, and general is not a property but rather a debt and an obligation to the other, as well a

gift that is to be given to the other, all of which “establish a lack.” Esposito says:

“I owe you something” but not “you owe me something.” This is what makes [the subjects of community] less than a master of themselves, and that more precisely expropriates them of their initial property (in part or completely), of the most proper property, namely, their very subjectivity.

What is given as a gift, debt, or obligation is the voiding of one’s own subjectivity and its exposure to become other, improper. Psychoanalysis might say that what we share is our constitutive lack.

6. Community is not a fully structured body full of individuals. It is also not a place of mutual, intersubjective recognition, says Esposito. Rather, community is that which interrupts the possibility of suturing the subject, of it returning upon itself; it is that which turns it inside out, exposed to the other: “a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject.”

7. It does not escape me that there might be a relationship between the impropriety of community and the impropriety of the subject of psychoanalysis. I wonder if we could think of the unconscious as the impropriety that is shared, the being inside out, the exteriority that is the most interior, the exposure to the other. If community, according to Esposito, produces “a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject,” which is also what the unconscious has the capacity to produce in the subject, then: could we talk about a community of the unconscious, a community of dreamers who dream awake, as it were?

8. A dream continues to live and change when we tell it to an-other; like it demands circulation or contagion. Unconscious life flows between us through the hidden vessels of the words we use to share our dreams. There is a secret history of the world in concert with the world we see.

9. Interpreting Jean-Luc Nancy, the present tasks of being in common are: l des-identification with fixed social roles (worker, parent, psychoanalyst, etc.) l sharing a constitutive lack (of identity) l being outside oneself and open to otherness (ecstasy) l sharing what I don’t have, or what the I doesn’t have l experiencing the experience of sharing which is a relation l un-working, or working away from, the possibility of falling into substantial essences (individual or collective).

Play is fundamental here. It is an intermediate, transitional, liminal area of experience that represents a threshold between the beginning of a process and its completion. The unworking of community through play means working against any completion of the process of community and striving to stay at that threshold of experiencing. Winnicott says that play is a third area of experiencing, where inside and outside become indistinguishable or irrelevant: it is a way of being outside one’s self, a state of ecstasy. Just look at a child playing.

10. A community is a multiplicity of dynamic, unconscious relations that crystallize in—riffing off Gilles Deleuze’s terminology—generic singularities: a person, a tree, a dog, a school, a union, etc. Generic singularities are both unique and non-specific: they have no existence outside a relational matrix, and they are ecstatically open to otherness. A community is multi-

ply rooted and multilingual, says Glissant, a “rhizome of a multiple relationship with the other” which bases community on a “poetics of relation.” A community psychoanalysis drinks from the poetic source of multilingualism. It confronts the discourse of the Single Root with the poetic praxis of the Multiply Rooted Mangrove. In this sense, it is a critique of what I would call “technical psychoanalysis,” its private language and praxis, and its self-imposed mystification.

Interlude

(A community psychoanalysis is a generic singularity that assumes the tasks listed in note 9—hence a community psychoanalysis and not community psychoanalysis as a substantive entity or concept. There is no space here to spell out each task and its relation to a community psychoanalysis; moreover: the connections between the latter and the new thinking on community of both Nancy and Esposito. Here I only offer some general ideas to be further developed in the future.)

A dream continues to live and change when we tell it to an-other; like it demands circulation or contagion. Unconscious life flows between us through the hidden vessels of the words we use to share our dreams.

Community Psychoanalysis

11. American institutionalized psychoanalysis has had both a privatized model of subjectivity and of its own praxis. The two are intimately intertwined. The model of the private office, as well as that of psychic suffering having its source mostly in intra-psychic conflicts, go hand in hand. This psychoanalysis has a model of the mind as a private consultation room. A community psychoanalysis disrupts this structure and its series of unthought equivalences.

12. A community psychoanalysis confronts the private, Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” with the “I was loved, therefore I am.” The subject presupposed by a community psychoanalysis is preceded by Eros and community and opens itself to them. The subject, fantasized as private within a certain institutionalized American psychoanalysis influenced by capitalism, finds its space in the other, in the space of the public, as we saw in talking about community. As Todd McGowan claims, “capitalism reverses the actual chronological relation of public and private. The subject first comes into existence as a public being and subsequently establishes a private world in which it shields itself from the public and fantasizes its isolation from others.” American institutionalized psychoanalysis has, with honorable exceptions that confirm the rule, fallen prey to this dynamic and forgotten that Eros is a force that binds and differentiates us publicly together. We cannot forget that the subject is a mournful being constituted by something that precedes it, names it, constituting it through the loss and lack implied in having been loved and loving back.

13. A community psychoanalysis takes psychoanalysis, and its notion of subjectivity, outside the realm of the private and moves towards a place of encounter, exposure, and ecstasy with what lies beyond, outside, other, with what is multiple and multiply rooted, with the ungraspable and improper realm of the common. I believe that, for a community psychoanalysis, the point of encounter, that which links it to what is other, is the experience of a suffering world.

14. Working on your “inner racist” (but we could also say: transphobe, homophobe, misogynist, etc.) is not some mysterious inner work that you do in the solitude of your room. Working on your inner racist means openly engaging with racialized others or the others who have been suppressed or attacked on account of their race: listening, asking questions, letting things get messy and confusing, making mistakes and fucking it up, being open to being corrected and changing your mind, getting hurt and hurting others who might get angry at you. It is a public engagement with the social world, not a private retreat into the self.

15. I remember that Simone Weil said that attention is a form of prayer. So maybe paying attention to the living is akin to

praying to the dead. Caring for those who live, their suffering, is a form of remembering whom we lost, of claiming their ancestry, their deeds and aliveness as ours. Praying, caring, and inheritance are interrelated tasks.

This is perhaps a way of interpreting Hans Loewald’s saying that psychoanalysis has to do with converting our ghosts into ancestors.

Without our dead, we’re just a gang, not a community. Community is also an engagement with the community of the dead.

16. We stand on our own feet but also on the feet of our dead.

Maybe they’re the same feet. There is no such thing as “our own” when it comes to human subjectivity and to community.

Only otherness and history.

17. The psychoanalytic process is not only a mirror of the world but also a part of it and its history. It does not occur in a historical or socio-political vacuum (the private office fosters this fantasy). The difference between the analyst and the analysand in terms of class, race, or gender, for example, will be a carrier of intrapsychic meanings, but it also defines a historical and socio-political reality in which they are both immersed and that constitutes their subjectivities and their relationship. It is a reality that is unavoidably enacted in the psychoanalytic process in unconscious ways that require attention. This remains the unthought of many analysts who are too anxious to talk about it because it might undermine their power as “doctors” or their position as the ones who are supposed to know; their power.

The transference-countertransference matrix is not only the repetition of personal history; it is also the repetition of collective histories. The question is how to think the personal and the collective together, as relation. Community might be a third, intermediate, transitional space that articulates this polarity.

18. There is an unconscious knot that the psychoanalytic process illuminates for understanding: the constitutive relationality between the mind and the world, the intimate link between the socio-historical dimension of the world and the internal dimension of subjectivity. We might say: between what Loewald calls the inter-psychic and the intra-psychic. The configuration of the knot, always singularly crystallized in each person, manifests itself both in speech and action within the psycho-social space of the analytic field. It is a simultaneous recreation of: l the unconscious structure of the analysand’s suffering in the world l the unconscious structure of the world that produces such suffering

In this sense, the psychoanalytic process deals with both individual and societal issues; alienation is one.

19. Interpretations should not only be about personal intra-psychic dynamics but also about inter-psychic ideological ones.

Ideology is, too, a clinical phenomenon.

20. For psychoanalysis there is a continuum between what we call “nature,” what we call “mind,” and what we call “social world.” This is evident in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, for example. The three are mediated by what Gilbert Simondon calls pre-individual and trans-individual processes which produce both psychic and collective individuation. It is important to note that individuation, for Simondon, is a never completed process. Interestingly, he says that “it is necessary to break the link that

connects being with individuation, identifies all beings with a being, with the individual.” Again, the individual cannot be a point of departure. Pre-individual and trans-individual processes constitute an “obscure zone,” he says, insofar as they have been unthought within the dichotomic conceptualization of the individual and the collective, or the individual and community.

21. Psychoanalysis has concepts to think about the obscure zones of passage between the different realms of reality; between subjectivity and community, between mind and body, between I and other.

For Hans Loewald, early, or pre-individual, integrative processes constitute/differentiate the mind-world. In this direction, Loewald says,

Without our dead, we’re just a gang, not a community. Community is also an engagement with the community of the dead …We stand on our own feet but also on the feet of our dead. Maybe they’re the same feet. There is no such thing as “our own” when it comes to human subjectivity and to community.

Projective-introjective processes, which are elements of the still rather obscure complex of integrative activities we call fantasy, continue in more highly differentiated forms to operate in the development and elaboration of reality during man’s [sic] lifetime. Otherwise reality would be static. “obscure”) continue to individuate both the psyche and (social) reality in an always dynamic way, moved by a state of constant flux, which might crystallize into a set of possibilities and relations which conglomerate around an open-ended individuation thought as potentiality.

Integration and differentiation are the work of Eros. Eros, according to Freud, is a force that traverses all the living: mind, nature, community. In this sense, the individuating processes Loewald talks about are also trans-individual. The trans-individual that also individuates both the psyche and social reality is not a wider subjectivity to which individual subjectivities belong. It is a process, not an essential, fixed, state of being. Just like Eros, it is an impersonal force, a reserve of becoming, says Simondon.

22. In Rabe’s 1785 novel, Baron Munchausen pulls himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own ponytail. This can be seen as the fantasy of the mind conceived as a private entity being able to lift itself out of self-ignorance into pure clarity without the need of the other. As if the self could become fully transparent to itself, as if we were private islands and not communal beings constituted by lack and by the sharing of that lack. It is also an image of subjectivity as my own property. It is an avoidance of the swamp (of community), those transition zones between the groundedness of earth and the fluidity of water; it is an avoidance of its messiness, its capacity to suck you in, its heterogeneity, and its density.

In this sense, it is an image of today’s self-help consumerism, commodification, and branding of self-care and constant “healing,” me-culture obsessed with one’s body and self, narcissistic self-definition, and individualism disguised as autonomy. A community psychoanalysis confronts this Zeitgeist but must be careful of not becoming one more form of capitalist commodification and branding, or a manic search toward reparative action, or what James Baldwin called “virtuous rage,” a state that is less motivated by a true and ongoing concern for the other and more “by a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil.”

23. Community and psychoanalysis say: we will never know who we are until we make ourselves a question to the other. The other as Oracle. Then we become a question to ourselves.

24. I end with Édouard Glissant: “sometimes by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself.” This implies that we are all lost, and especially lost without the other. z

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst and philosopher. He is researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CNR) in Rome, Italy. He is the president of Institute for Advanced Studies in psychoanalysis (ISAP) in Italy. He teaches Psychoanalysis in the Intern. Institute of Psychology of Depth in Kijv. Since 1995 until 2020 he was the founder and the editor of EJP. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, and he is member of the Editorial Board of American Imago and Psychoanalytic Discourse.

Dr. George Bermudez, Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst at The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis Los Angeles, and 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) has developed pioneering scholarship and practice –an expansion toward a social psychoanalysis–exploring the “social unconscious” through “social dreaming”.

Marisa Berwald, LCSW, is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, pursuing a doctorate in cultural and psychoanalytic anthropology. She conducts ethnographic research on the discipline of psychoanalysis, tracking how it shifts in response to changing aspects of human subjectivity in the Anthropocene.

Martha Bragin, LCSW, Ph.D. is jointly appointed Professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the PhD Program in Social Welfare at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr Bragin is a Fellow of the Research Training Program of the IPA, and the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. She serves as a member of Inter Agency Standing Committee (UN-IFRCNGO) Reference Group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings, a globally representative body that sets and monitors standards for psychosocial interventions in emergencies. Representing the International Association of Schools of Social Work at the United Nations. She is the author of numerous peer reviewed publications and is in private practice in New York City.

Nancy Burke, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in Evanston IL. She is Vice-Chair of EMHS-NFP, the Kedzie Center’s Board, and is a core faculty and board member of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Associate Clinical Professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, Founder of PsiAN, Secretary and Board member of ISPSUS and ABAPsa, active in SPPP’s Public Affairs Committe, and member of the 606 Project. Her writing has appeared in various psychoanalytic and literary publications.

Fernando Castrillón, Psy.D., is a practicing personal and supervising psychoanalyst, faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), a licensed clinical psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and the founder of the Foundation of California Psychoanalysis (FCP). He is also the founding director of CIIS’ The Clinic Without Walls, an innovative psychotherapy clinic serving mostly poor and immigrant communities. Dr. Castrillón is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and a member of the Istituto Elvio Fachinelli ISAP (Institute of Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis) based in Rome, Italy. He is the coeditor of two books and author of numerous articles in Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and English and is currently writing a multivolume work on psychoanalysis and California. www.drcastrillon. com, www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu

Elizabeth Ann Danto, PhD, is professor emeritus, Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is an international lecturer and prize-winning author of Freud’s Free Clinics - Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press 2005), Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008), and co-editor of Freud/Tiffany - Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and the ‘Best Possible School’ (Routledge, 2018).

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW is a Latina/Bilingual Psychoanalyst who is a first born American to Central American immigrants and is the first BIPOC CoDirector at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis in New York City. She is founder and former Co-Chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity at MIP, CoFounder of the Psychoanalytic Coalition for Social Justice, serves on the Board of Division 39-Section 9 («Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility») and is Co-Editor of The Psychoanalytic Activist. She is Faculty and Supervisor at Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, NIP, The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center and teaches at the Smith College School for Social Work.

Thomas Marchevsky, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice, licensed clinical psychologist, and supervising analyst based in California. He is an editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Clinic Director of The Clinic Without Walls, and an adjunct faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His current research areas are psychoanalysis, topology, subjectivity, jazz improvisation, and Tibetan Buddhism. www.drthomasmarchevsky.com

Kenneth A. Frank is an American clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, and co-founder of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City, where he is Director of Training. A faculty member of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1974–2009, he was Clinical Professor in Psychiatry from 1996-2009. He received his MA (1964) and PhD (1967) in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University.

Orna Ophir is an Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy & the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University. Ophir is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), serving on its Committee on the History of Psychoanalysis.

Matthew Oyer, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is a Co-Director of the training program at the Greene Clinic, Assistant Clinical Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine, and Adjunct Supervising Faculty in the clinical psychology doctoral program at City College. He completed his doctoral training at the City University of New York and his doctoral internship at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI) and Mount Sinai Medical Center. With a small group of others, Dr. Oyer created and implemented a program of independent psychoanalytic training through which he continues to pursue lifelong formation. He has experience working in a wide range of settings, from inpatient psychiatric units and intensive hospital-based outpatient programs, to therapeutic communities, to substance abuse treatment facilities, to university counseling centers and outpatient mental health clinics. Dr. Oyer is on the editorial board of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Carlos Padrón, LP is a licensed psychoanalyst with a background in philosophy and literary studies. Carlos was a faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where he co-taught a class on clinical aspects of diversity. He was also the co-chair of Iptar’s Diversity Committee. He taught the Seminar on Psychodynamic Theory (Masters in Social Work) at the Silberman School of Social Work in CUNY. Carlos participated in the documentary “Psychoanalysis in El Barrio”, a film on working psychoanalytically with poor and working-class Latinx patients in the U.S., and has given talks and published on this topic and on clinical issues related to difference: race, culture, gender, class, ethnicity, immigration. Carlos has worked psychoanalytically in different settings and is currently a clinical associate of the New School Psychotherapy Program where he supervises PhD students in Psychology.

Tracy Sidesinger, PsyD is a feminist psychotherapist bilocated between Flatbush, Brooklyn and Upstate New York. Dr. Sidesinger serves as the Psychotherapy Action Network’s representative to the Mental Health Liaison Group, a nationwide policy group which advocates for equitable mental health resources through legislative means; and as artist residency coordinator on the Board of Directors for the Museum of Motherhood in St Petersburg, FL. Areas of interest include community psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality, motherhood, spirituality, and culture.

Kirkland C. Vaughans, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and Fellow/ Training and Supervising Analyst of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research {IPTAR}, Adjunct Professor in both the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the Mitchell Relational Study Center, and Clinical Director of the Derner/Hempstead Child Clinic and Senior Adjunct Professor at the Derner School of Psychology. He is a founding member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and serves on the boards of the Holmes Commission of the American Psychoanalytic Association, He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.

Kalen Wheeler, MHC, MSEd is completing her postgraduate training as a clinical psychotherapist at a psychoanalytically-oriented group practice in Brooklyn, New York. She is also a part-time Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Educational Foundations and Mental Health Counseling at CUNY Hunter College, which is also her alma mater. Before transitioning to clinical psychotherapy, Kalen worked as a school counselor and restorative justice practitioner in the New York City Department of Education.