✦ Community Psychoanalysis Speaker Series ✦
The Community Speaker Series is a program of talks on psychoanalysis and politics that are open to the public, with past talks ranging from 2021 - 2025, sponsored by the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the Greene Clinic.
The Community Psychoanalysis Speaker Series runs along with the Psychosis in the City lecture series through Spring 2025.
✦ Psychosis in the City ✦
Our Spring 2025 lecture series, Psychosis in the City, explores psychoanalytic work with people experiencing serious mental illness in urban communities. This series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and 2024 Grant Recipient at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. Dr. Landry is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.
All 2025 talks will be held in person at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis in Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are free for the public and paid registration is available for those seeking Continuing Education credits (1.5 CEs available for NYS psychologists, social workers, licensed mental health counselors, and psychoanalysts).
Elan Cohen ✦ Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Repetition of Trauma in Psychiatric Services
As Paul Racamier observed, psychiatric institutions are vulnerable to a reversal in their therapeutic purpose, sometimes adopting the symptoms they aim to treat. Other stakeholders have noted that psychiatric services can be retraumatizing, duplicating the forms of suffering that are embedded in symptoms of madness and trauma on a massive scale. What insights can psychoanalysis offer to disrupt the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services? Embracing a history of psychoanalytic thought, this talk critiques prevailing biopolitical approaches and reimagines therapeutic practice to honor the dignity and subjectivity of persons with psychosis. Drawing from Freud, Ferenczi, Bion, and Lacan, the presentation advocates for clinical approaches that focus on the relationship between the subject of psychosis and the social link. By locating the etiology of psychiatric suffering in traumatic human relationships, attacks on linking, or foreclosure from the symbolic order, we might have a better chance at addressing the repetition of trauma in psychiatric services.
Elan Cohen holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Adelphi University, where he researched the intersections of historical trauma and psychosis through the lenses of biopolitics and psychoanalysis. Since 2012, his clinical experience has included community mental health programs, state psychiatric centers, city hospitals, and outpatient clinics. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Ethical Human Psychiatry and Psychology, and Psychosis. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Soho Psychoanalytic, where he works with adolescents and adults of all ages, identities, and socio-cultural backgrounds.
Danielle Knafo ✦ From Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis
Dr. Knafo, who has worked with psychosis in a variety of settings for over 40 years, will describe the reasons why she believes most psychoanalysts have veered away from the treatment of psychosis in recent decades. She will then present her approach to meeting the challenges of working with individuals undergoing extreme states. Her approach focuses primarily on providing safety, forging a working alliance by meeting the patient where they are and allotting them maximum personal agency, understanding their symptoms as attempts at adaptation and restoration of the self, coping with loneliness, and working with the transference and countertransference. She works with a patient's strengths as well as weaknesses. Most importantly, Dr. Knafo's approach to therapy involves viewing the patient as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms, prioritizing subjective experience and affect, and seeing the patient as a true collaborator in their own treatment. Clinical examples will illustrate her points.
Dr. Danielle Knafo is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with expertise in the treatment of psychosis. During her tenure as professor at L.I.U.’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program for 22 years, she trained doctoral students on how to work therapeutically and psychodynamically with serious mental illness. She received the prestigious Barbro Sandin award for this work. Currently, she is faculty and supervisor at Adelphi’s Postgraduate Programs and NYU’s Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written and lectured extensively on the topics of art and creativity, psychoanalysis, trauma and psychosis, sexuality and technology. From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis is her tenth book. Dr. Knafo has worked psychodynamically with psychosis for 40 years, and she maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, NY.
Neil Gong ✦ Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles
This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public safety net providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in jail, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts medication refusal and drug use so long as undesired behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, I show how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and control a form of privilege.
Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (University of Chicago Press 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press 2020). Neil's public writings have appeared in such venues as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis (TAACP)
Saturday, April 26, 2025
12:30 - 3:30 PM EST
virtual on Zoom
Avgi Saketopoulou ✦ Against Transantagonism: Towards a Metapsychology for the Flourishing of Trans Children
In this presentation, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou urges psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed clinicians to let the debate about the validity of trans children take its place in the fossil record of analytic history. It is time, she suggests, to move beyond transantagonism: rather than sparring with colleagues who see trans existence as cause for alarm, we need to be working on developing the psychoanalytic theories we need and do not yet have to work towards the flourishing of trans and queer children. Let us refuse, once and for all, the philanthropy of being “inclusive,” delving, instead, into the difficult task of seeing what pressures trans children and adults put on existing thinking about gender. Starting with the premise that trans children deserve no less than a psychoanalysis that wants their transness and which does not treat their genders as undesirable or inauthentic requires our field to endure the twisting and re-making of our metapsychology’s very foundations. At stake is a psychoanalysis that is responsible and response-able to queer life.
With clinical material, Dr. Saketopoulou will address what stands in the way of a psychoanalysis that works towards the flourishing of trans and queer children, taking on key concepts in child analysis. She will explain why the notion of core gender identity nests a ticking time bomb into the clinical process and why we need to relinquish our attachment to it; how we may reflect on gender not through the rubric of identity but under the aegis of contingency; why thinking about trauma as constitutive of some queer and some trans experience does not have to necessarily capsize into homotransphobia or conversion; how the demand for coherence and continuity overlooks the workings of important heteroclite psychic processes; and how we may think developmentally without collapsing into developmentalism. The implications of this presentation extend far beyond the particularities of trans and queer childhoods, and gesture towards renewed foundations for child psychoanalysis overall.
Originally from Cyprus and Greece, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou (she/her) is a psychoanalyst living and practicing in NYC. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and her scholarship has received numerous prizes including APsA's Ralph Roughton Award, the Symonds Prize from SGS, and the Ruth Stein Prize from her home institute. She is twice the recipient of the annual JAPA essay prize (in 2014 for her paper on her work with a trans girl, and in 2023) and her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna).
Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) puts psychoanalysis in contact with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity (UIT Press, 2023), which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which the two authors received the International Psychoanalytical Association’s First Tiresias Prize. In critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche, Saketopoulou is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism. Her love of queers and trans people is rivaled only by her love of motorcycles. She detests transphobes-even the gay ones.
✦ This event is a fundraiser. 100% of tickets and donation proceeds will be directed to The Trevor Project, a nationally recognized organization that provides suicide prevention, advocacy, public education, and community for LGBTQ+ youth. ✦
Community Psychoanalysis Speaker Series
Saturday, May 17, 2025
2:00 - 4:00 PM EST
in person at 81 Court Street
Deborah Anna Luepnitz ✦ Insight For All: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness
✦ with Elizabeth Ann Danto as the interlocutor ✦
This presentation challenges the assumption that psychoanalysis is relevant only to people of means by referring both to Freud's free clinics and to Winnicott's work with homeless children. We will proceed to a discussion of IFA (Insight For All)—a group in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year, that connects analysts with adults who are, or have been, street homeless. A relational framework leaning on Winnicott's concepts will be used while making room for important insights from the work of Jacques Lacan. Caring for marginalized people can have the positive effect of unsettling psychoanalytic theories and expanding them for our time. Clinical material will be offered to illustrate the meaning of several types of homelessness.
Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. She has taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for over 30 years. She is the author of 3 books, including: The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: 5 Stories of Psychotherapy, which has been translated into 7 languages. She was a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Dr. Luepnitz is the founder of Insight For All, which connects psychoanalysts with homeless and formerly homeless adults. In 2013, she was given the Distinguished Educator Award by the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She maintains a private practice in Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.
Community Psychoanalysis Speaker Series
Thursday, May 22nd, 2025
7:00 - 9:00 PM EST
in person at 81 Court Street
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian ✦ Livability Against Ashlaa'
Ashlaa’ as an analytic illuminates the textures of Palestinian life and death, and perhaps more accurately life in death. Parallel to the material work of excavating the pieces of our Palestinian flesh from beneath the rubble, the talk will engage with new epistemological spaces excavated by Gazans when and while creating life, knowledge, and new humanity. Thinking through ashlaa is thinking against the carceral logic of the colonizer, and making a break in the colonizer’s system. It is thinking of the wholeness of Palestine against Tashlea’ (cutting the body to pieces) and acting actively to rupture the genocidal logic.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonial state’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is the Global Chair in Law - Queen Mary University of London, Professor Extraordinarius - University of South Africa, Visiting Professor - Princeton University, and Professor emeritus - the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press 2019); co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.
There are no upcoming events at this time.