ABOUT
The Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis is a new online project that explores how philosophical, political, & social thought can generate new approaches to clinical practice in psychoanalysis & psychodynamic psychotherapies.
We are interested in exploring how evolving academic production & pedagogy are playing a significant role in redefining psychoanalytic theory & influencing its contemporary practice, alongside broader interpretations of “psychotherapy.” We aim to move beyond empty rhetoric & seek to promote critical & clinical analysis so that we may find our way together as a broader community of clinicians as we navigate the dialectic of theory & practice.
In this way, a social interpretation & application of “psychoanalysis requires an approach that locates all forms of change in the appropriate social context, thus avoiding the temptation to see salvation in therapy while also spelling out the contribution that analytic help can make to wider social struggle.” [Frosh, 1987]
We currently organize workshops, provide group consultations, & share writings/essays. Our long-term goal is to create a community clinic, a space where the critical & clinical meet in praxis.
Please send us your previously published or unpublished texts/essays if you feel they align with our project. We would love to consider sharing them on the website.
Contact: cccacommunity@gmail.com
Darragh Sheehan
is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, & adjunct lecturer at the Silberman School of Social Work (CUNY) in New York City. She has experience working with a diversity of patients, but her primary work has been with migrants from Latin America (in New York state and federally funded Victim Assistance Programs and FQHC-Federally Funded Community Health Clinics), providing psychodynamic psychotherapy and other forms of advocacy.
Darragh began her clinical education in Buenos Aires, Argentina, prior to getting her MSW, where she trained in various psychotherapeutic modalities. Her primary post-graduate studies were in New York City, where she trained in a Neo-Reichian somatically orientated psychodynamic psychotherapy: one of the earlier clinical attempts at integrating the political, the body, & subjectivity.
She hopes to draw on her firsthand experience in direct community work to foster discussion and critical examination of the structural & material conditions shaping the social work profession, as well as contemporary discourses on “mental health” & their practices. As a social worker, she argues that attention to class relations, poverty, access to universal public services, & the redistribution of wealth is foundational for the social work profession. This must also be a focus for psychodynamic psychotherapeutic approaches that seek to engage meaningfully with political & social realities.
She currently practices in Brooklyn.
Carlos padrón
is a licensed psychoanalyst from Venezuela who has lived in New York City for over 20 years. He has an MA in Philosophy from the New School & an MPhil in Latin American Literature from NYU and trained at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in NYC.
Carlos has written & presented on the relations between philosophy & psychoanalysis, community psychoanalysis, & clinical issues related to difference. He has work published in Out Art (Magazine of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association); Division Review; Psychoanalytic Psychology; Journal of Infant, Child, & Adolescent Psychotherapy; Room: A Sketchbook for Psychoanalytic Action; Stillpoint Magazine; Trópicos (Journal of the Psychoanalytic Society of Caracas); Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, & the Unconscious (Routledge), Psychoanalytic Dialogues; & Child & Adolesent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis: War, Pandemic, & Climate Change(Routledge); among other places.
Carlos is currently a faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training & Research (IPTAR) & the Blanton Peale Psychoanalytic Institute. He has taught at various analytic institutes in New York City, as well as at the Silberman School of Social Work (CUNY). Carlos has worked & supervised psychoanalytically in different settings, including community health clinics (Article 31s), schools, & non-profit organizations. And he believes that in order for psychoanalysis to survive, it must be made a public service.
He currently practices in Brooklyn.