Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP
Zak Mucha, LCSW
Introduction to Community Psychoanalysis I
Date/Time/Location TBD
Nancy Burke, PhD, ABPP, is a board member, core faculty member and past-president of CCP. She is the co-chair of Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago, NFP, Vice-President of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis-US, a co-convener of the 606 Project, on the board of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology and Associate Clinical Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University.
Zak Mucha, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst in private practice and an executive board member at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He spent seven years working as the supervisor of an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) program, providing 24/7 services to persons suffering from severe psychosis, substance abuse issues, and homelessness. Mucha has also worked as a counselor and consultant for U.S. combat veterans undergoing training for digital forensic investigations in child pornography. Before going into the clinical field, he worked as a freelance journalist, truck driver, furniture mover, construction worker, union organizer, staff member at a juvenile DCFS locked unit, and taught briefly at a women’s prison. He is the author of Emotional Abuse: A Manual for Self-Defense and Swimming to the Horizon: Crack, Psychosis, and Street-Corner Social Work.
Title: Introduction to Community Psychoanalysis I and II
Seminar Description:This introductory two-part course, which is required for participants in the CCP/CPT, addresses the history of community psychoanalysis and explores general questions regarding its status and foundations: Is a community psychoanalysis possible, or is ‘community psychoanalysis’ an oxymoron? Is all psychoanalysis ultimately community psychoanalysis? How does an agency’s embeddedness in a specific community allow for insights that can offer input regarding and transformation of core psychoanalytic concepts? How does one assess the potential for “psychoanalytic” work with someone who faces multiple material structural challenges, and what modifications of technique are called for? How can psychoanalysis illuminate experiences of immigration, forced migration and dislocation? How can psychoanalysis best be used to understand and hold the group dynamics of the clinic itself, and to foster opportunities for communal growth? To what extent are our aspirations for healing constrained by the systems in which we are embedded? What is a culturally responsive psychoanalysis? What is the extent of the isomorphism between family, individual and group dynamics and are these resonances uniquely relevant in treatments that take place in clinic spaces?
These questions will be addressed in case-presentation format, in which the nested “cases” to be considered will be the individual (to be emphasized in the first course), the family, the clinic, the community and the social/economic/political/cultural surround.
Each of these two introductory classes, one offered during the fall term and one to be offered in the winter, will consist of six in-person 2-hour meetings at a time to be arranged by the CPT participants. A third component of the CPT introductory series will take place in the winter of 2027.