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, presented, and published on community and school-based mental health, relational psychoanalysis, class, Whiteness and racism, and professional basketball, all from a psychoanalytic perspective.  

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.

His research interests include community mental health, relational psychoanalysis, severe mental illness, child and adolescent therapy, decolonial psychology, and merging socio-cultural-political thinking with psychoanalysis.

Dr. Cushman trained and worked for several years in 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. 

Publications

Cushman, D.G. (2025). Who gets to be a child? Clinical and cultural reflections on racism, white infantilization, and Kyle Rittenhouse. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 35(4), 478-499

Cushman, D.G. (2025). Possibilities and expansion for adultification bias and white infantilization. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 35(4), 511-516.

Cushman, D. G. (2024). The psychoanalysis of basketball. In J. Black & J. Reynoso (Eds.), Sport and psychoanalysis: What sport reveals about our unconscious desires, fantasies and fears. Lexington Books.

Cushman, D. (2019). Hiding in plain sight: An examination of electronic medical records in community mental health. Fort Da, 25(1), 27-42.

Cushman, D. (2014). Case management and the analytic frame: A new paradigm. Fort Da, 20(2), 65-80.