Community Psychoanalysis Track
A new pathway bridging psychoanalytic training and community-based care
The FCP Community Psychoanalysis Track
Mission
The FCP-CPT brings together psychoanalytic institutes across the U.S. to build a shared community of practice, rooted in mutual learning and free from the boundaries of any single school or institution. Our work opens space for honest engagement with race, class, coloniality, gender, sexuality, immigration, and exclusion, while embracing the vulnerability and interdependence that comes from working in community. We believe psychoanalysis becomes more vital, more relevant, and more just when it is practiced and taught this way.
How We Got Here
Psychoanalysis has made real strides in engaging with the social and political forces that shape human experience. But its training structures have been slower to change. Psychoanalytic education remains costly and largely inaccessible, institutes tend to operate in isolation from one another and from the communities that need care most, and the basic framework of training has changed little in over a hundred years.
The FCP-CPT was founded by five psychoanalysts from different institutional backgrounds who believed it was time to imagine something different: a training pathway that is more accessible, more inclusive, and more connected to the world outside the consulting room. In partnership with the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, which is launching a parallel track in Chicago, the FCP-CPT is part of a growing inter-institutional effort to reimagine what psychoanalytic institutes and community institutions of care look like.
What Institutes + Candidates Can Expect
Program Structure
The FCP-CPT is a one-year immersive track for candidates in partner psychoanalytic institutes, built around four integrated components that together form a complete training experience in community psychoanalysis.
Clinical Placement - Participants are placed in community mental health settings around NYC and co-facilitate psychoanalytically-informed group spaces for community members.
Group Consultation - Participants join bi-monthly case conference groups, mixing candidates from the FCP-CPT in New York and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis CPT.
Supervision- Participants receive bi-weekly supervision with clinicians experienced in community-based work.
Curriculum - Participants engage in three, 15-hour weekend seminars spanning the history of the psychoanalytic clinic, the politics of care, and the frontiers of community-based practice. Seminar content is developed in collaboration with The Greene Clinic, drawn from their Community Psychoanalysis Speaker Series.
What Community Mental Health Partners Can Expect
One or more trained psychoanalytic candidates placed at your site for 12 months + to facilitate psychoanalytically-informed group spaces with either patients or staff members
A dedicated FCP liaison to support onboarding, coordination, and ongoing integration
All training, mentorship, and clinical supervision provided by partner institutes and FCP at no cost
Participation in a broader dialogue between psychoanalytic and community mental health communities
Psychoanalytic Institute Partners
The FCP-CPT pilot launches in partnership with the Pulsion Institute, a NYC-based psychoanalytic training program for clinicians and academics that addresses socio-political concerns and the psychic and social together.
Community Mental Health Partners
The Fostering Connection
The Fostering Connection provides pro-bono, long-term, trauma-informed psychotherapy to foster-affected families and young adults who face systemic barriers to mental health care. TFC primarily serves older teens and young adults aging out of the foster care system, who often face a significant gap in mental health services, exacerbated by complex histories of trauma and limited access to social support. All clients are from BIPOC communities living below the poverty line.
Rose Hill Psychoanalytic Pain Clinic
A community based psychoanalytically-oriented clinic in the Bronx and midtown NY is designed specifically to address the intersection of psychological and somatic pain for both the individual and the community. Somatic pain as it relates to a wide range of conditions from chronic pain to autoimmune diseases is intimately linked to pain relieving medications and to pain management addictions. Such addictions have shown a marked increase in the post-Covid era. Newly empaneled to accept many Medicaid plans, the RH Psychoanalytic Pain Clinic is expanding its outreach more deeply into the community to help bring a psychoanalytically informed approach to pain to patients who could not otherwise afford treatment.
Collaborators
The long-term work of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco has been an invaluable thought partner and foundation in shaping this track. Their experience building community psychoanalytic training for over a decade has informed and continues to inspire our path forward.
We are also grateful to be in collaboration with the Free Psy Project, an international research initiative that serves as a consultant to our model. The Free Psy Project studies collectives that open psychoanalytic spaces to excluded and marginal individuals and groups, tracing the history and present of free psychoanalytic clinics as laboratories of political experimentation, and exploring their influence on mental health, inequality, and the social bond.
We are learning from and with many others whose work continues to shape ours, including: The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Program, Bard Microcollege, Bard Prison Initiative, Bubble & Speak, The Center for Group Studies, The Center for Urban Community Services (Janian Medical Care), Fountain House, La Maison Verte, The Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, The National Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), New Alternatives, New York University Postdoc, and Therapy Access Project.
FCP-CPT Steering Committee
Tracy Simon, PsyD, Pulsion Institute Faculty + Supervisor
Jamieson Webster, PhD, Pulsion Institute Board of Trustees, FCP Board of Directors
Loren Dent, PhD, Greene Clinic Co-Director, FCP Board of Directors
Matthew Oyer, PhD, Greene Clinic Co-Director, FCP Board of Directors
Christopher Landry, MD, Fountain House
Jamie Cunningham, FCP Managing Director
Get Involved
Whether you are a psychoanalytic institute exploring a partnership or a community mental health program looking to collaborate, we want to hear from you. Reach out to learn more about the FCP-CPT, ask questions, or start a conversation about next steps.