The changing role of psychoanalysis: beyond action for mental health

Desegregation and the retreat of clinical psychoanalysis

This article examines the racial politics that reshaped psychoanalytic psychotherapy and ushered in a community mental health paradigm during the U.S. Civil Rights Era. Policymakers in the 1960s adopted the language of social justice to condemn psychoanalysis for its inability to treat psychotics and its unwillingness to treat black patients; yet the community psychiatry model of treatment that replaced it compounded the denial of the black subject's clinical needs. Challenging the extant historiography that appraises psychoanalysis as a victim of neoliberalism and psychopharmacology, this paper examines how and why Freudian practitioners beat their own retreat from the specter of desegregation.

Psychoanalysis and the community mental health movement

Psychoanalysis and CMHM were once enemies. Psychoanalysis has made noteworthy advances toward the CMHM idea both in technique changes and in community involvement. It is possible that CMHM may finally reject all psychoanalytic contribution and face its future without a theory. If that takes place, the CMHM some day in its future may turn a corner and find itself face to face with the lonely, individual man, conscious of his past and fearful of the unexplained anxiety within him. It is then that the CMHM will find itself once again studying the works of Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, and the psychoanalytic world.