Spring Symposium

Holding it Together: Community Psychoanalysis and 40 years of the Infant-Parent Program

Laura Briggs, PhD, Daniel Gaztambide, PhD, Kandace Thomas, MPP, PhD, Mahima Muralidharan, PsyD

Saturday May 1, 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM

It is through direct work with clients that we feel the pulse of social change and evolve new programs and modify old programs to meet new community needs. This means that a good curriculum reflects the best in current practice and thinking and derives its infusions of new knowledge from the work of thousands of practitioners.
— Selma Fraiberg, LCSW

Selma Fraiberg and colleagues established the Infant-Parent Program (IPP) at UCSF four decades ago at the invitation of then chief of psychiatry Robert Wallerstein. IPP pioneered a model of community psychoanalysis that involves both infant-parent psychotherapy and early childhood mental health consultation, as well as a multidisciplinary training program that has produced vanguard clinicians and researchers in various fields. Many psychoanalytically oriented, publicly situated programs have perished, and IPP is not immune to similar forces of fragmentation. This symposium celebrates IPP’s 40-year anniversary and spotlights community psychoanalysis as an emergent clinical and intellectual paradigm that confronts the many psychosocial and biopolitical crises of the twenty-first century. Presentations consider the U.S. history of child taking from settlement and slavery to the child welfare system; community psychoanalysis and/or a psychoanalysis for the people; the closure of psychoanalytically oriented clinics; and social justice-informed infant and early childhood mental health practice.