Splits in the fabric: A community psychoanalytic project during COVID-19

Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pande...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of psychoanalysis 2024-08, Vol.105 (4), p.521-541
Main Authors: González, Francisco J, Slome, Lee
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Community
Community Mental Health Services - organization & administration
COVID-19
Groups
Health problems
Humans
Inequality
Intervention
Leadership
Mental health
Mental health services
Pandemics
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysts
Psychoanalytic Therapy - methods
Public health
Racism
San Francisco
SARS-CoV-2
Trauma
Unconsciousness
Video conferencing
Working conditions
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Summary:Demonstrating how psychoanalysts can be useful in community settings outside the conventional consulting room, this paper describes consultation and group interventions conducted at a San Francisco mental health agency serving a largely Asian community. In the traumatic context of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency staff became fragmented, due to remote working conditions and differential work assignments, including mandated deployments to emergency sites. Two psychoanalysts worked with agency leadership to devise a weekly process group held by video conferencing over 6 months, in an attempt to heal resentments and splits in the fabric of the agency. Examples of the group process, interventions, and major themes that emerged are described, as well as recommendations made, including the formation of an ongoing clinical consultation group. The paper situates these interventions in the greater context of the pandemic which exposed not only a universal threat to life and health, but also structural vulnerabilities organized along lines of (racial) difference and inequity. The dynamics at the agency are thus described as rooted within greater nested histories: of the clinic, its leadership, and their relationship with a strained public health system, and more broadly, of the tangled intersection of these histories with anti-Asian racism. These are understood as manifestations of the Social Unconscious, and the intervention as an example of Community Psychoanalysis.
ISSN:0020-7578
1745-8315
1745-8315
DOI:10.1080/00207578.2024.2354806