Research Interests

Community mental health; relational psychoanalysis; intersectional approaches to psychoanalysis; liberation psychology; critical examination of whiteness; race, class and cultural understandings from a psychoanalytic lens; transference & countertransference; anti-colonial pedagogy; play therapy; adolescent development; school-based mental health; social-constructivist & hermeneutic approaches to psychology practice and research.

Biography

David Cushman, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist. He received his doctorate from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA. He came into the field of psychology with an interest in thinking about both individuals and systems, and locating the individual within larger socio-cultural-political structures that produce marginalization, trauma, and widespread disenfranchisement.  

Dr. Cushman’s dissertation focused on comparing countertransference reactions in community mental health settings to private practice settings. He has written and published on community mental health from a psychoanalytic perspective, including perspectives on how case management tasks and electronic medical records affect the therapeutic dyad and reflect larger societal pressures exerted on both therapists and clients.  

His involvement in psychoanalytic organizations has centered on integrating psychoanalytic thinking with community mental health, including as a board member for NCSPP as the Community Mental Health Committee chair, a member of the organizing committee for Reflective Spaces/Material Places, and part of the Community Psychoanalysis Committee for PINC.

Dr. Cushman trained and worked for several years at RAMS Inc., a community mental health clinic in San Francisco, where he was a clinician, supervisor, and program manager. He has a private practice in Oakland, where he sees children, teens, adults, and couples.