Abstract

In this paper, the author expresses a hopeful understanding of how psychoanalysis can be applied in community crisis intervention. He draws on key concepts from the interpersonal tradition to revitalize community work and thinking with traumatized groups and communities in general. The author uses psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, countertransference, enactment, and working through to describe a community intervention in a four-year project with an impoverished community in South Central Los Angeles following the 1992 riots that occurred there. He also arrives at new community concepts that are psychoanalytically informed and emphasizes how these can be helpful to individual clinicians in making sense of certain clinical phenomena that are opaque without an understanding of the community context of their patients.

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