ABSTRACT
Most analysts around the world have come to take for granted that psychoanalysis is an office-based practice. I will suggest that this location for psychoanalysis is an historical artifact-that, in fact, psychoanalysis can be practiced in the community, out of the office, and needs to be so practiced if it is to survive with much social relevance. With respect to trauma, in particular, human societies contain many individuals who have suffered, and are suffering, a variety of traumata, including ongoing traumatizing circumstances such as extreme material poverty, brutal discrimination, war, untreated and unnecessary illness and death. Most such people will never show up in a psychoanalyst’s private office. If we, as analysts, insist that our work can take place only in the professional office, we will, in effect, be failing to address the most urgent forms of suffering around us. Psychoanalysis, I suggest, is about the engagement of suffering, including the inevitable inclination to avoid suffering. We cannot succeed as psychoanalysts if we fail to examine how and why we insulate ourselves from so much suffering.
