Desegregation and the Retreat of Clinical Psychoanalysis Christopher Chamberlin 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract This article examines the racial politics that reshaped psychoanalytic psychotherapy and ushered in a community mental health paradigm during the U.S. Civil Rights Era. Policymakers in the 1960s adopted the language of social justice to condemn psychoanalysis for its inability to treat psychotics and its unwillingness to treat black patients; yet the community psychiatry model of treatment that replaced it compounded the denial of the black subject’ s clinical needs. Challenging the extant historiography that appraises psychoanalysis as a victim of neoliberalism and psychopharmacology, this paper examines how and why Freudian practitioners beat their own retreat from the specter of desegregation. Keywords Psychoanalysis . Psychiatry . Race . Community Mental Health Act . Civil Rights Movement Fifty years ago, the cultural prestige and medical authority of psychoanalysis suddenly evaporated. In its place, a new mental health regime emerged that promised lower costs, greater accessibility, and measurable outcomes. Productive happiness was this new regime’ s stated goal; behavioral adjustment backed by the prescription pad was its means. This, at least, is the default narrative in the historiography of psychoanalysis in the United States. Paul Stepansky, a long-time editor in the American psychoanalytic press, includes in the laundry list of factors that contributed to clinical psychoanalysis’ s demise Bthe biological turn in American psychiatry, managed care, the cost-effectiveness of non-analytic therapies, the maturing of psycho-pharmacology, and the failure of psychoanalysis to provide compelling evidence of its efficacy in relation to other interventional modalities^ (2009, ix). Justin Clemens reconfirms that a Bpsychopharmacological dispensation^ that began to accelerate in the 1960s had unambiguously deleterious effects on psychoanalysis (2013, 19). And in his political history, Eli Zaretsky argues that Bthe ascent of a full-blown consumerist spirit of capitalism coincided with the decline of psychoanalysis^ (2015, 33), with the latter replaced by relational and Journal of Medical Humanities https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-019-09549-x * Christopher Chamberlin cechamberlin@berkeley.edu 1 University of California, Berkeley, 322 Wheeler Hall, Berkeley 94720, USA