Deborah Anna Luepnitz ✦ Insight For All: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness

✦ with Elizabeth Ann Danto as the interlocutor ✦

This presentation challenges the assumption that psychoanalysis is relevant only to people of means by referring both to Freud's free clinics and to Winnicott's work with homeless children. We will proceed to a discussion of IFA (Insight For All)—a group in Philadelphia, now in its 21st year, that connects analysts with adults who are, or have been, street homeless. A relational framework leaning on Winnicott's concepts will be used while making room for important insights from the work of Jacques Lacan. Caring for marginalized people can have the positive effect of unsettling psychoanalytic theories and expanding them for our time. Clinical material will be offered to illustrate the meaning of several types of homelessness.

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. She has taught courses on psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for over 30 years. She is the author of 3 books, including: The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Family Therapy and Schopenhauer's Porcupines: 5 Stories of Psychotherapy, which has been translated into 7 languages. She was a contributing author to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Dr. Luepnitz is the founder of Insight For All, which connects psychoanalysts with homeless and formerly homeless adults. In 2013, she was given the Distinguished Educator Award by the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She maintains a private practice in Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Ann Danto is emeritus professor at Hunter College – City University of New York, and an independent curator who writes and lectures internationally on the history of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and a marker of urban culture. She is the author of Historical Research (Oxford University Press, 2008) and her book Freud’s Free Clinics – Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005) received the Gradiva Book Award and the Goethe Prize.