Announcing the Known and Elsewhere Collective, Parapraxis Books, and our new space in Oakland.
August 3, 2026
Today we announce The Psychosocial Foundation’s opening of a therapeutic collective, education space, and bookstore at 1742 Franklin Street in Uptown Oakland.
Starting in just one month, the Known and Elsewhere Collective (KAEC) will offer individual and group therapy, child, adult, and forensic assessment, supervision groups, consultation to left spaces and other clinics, and therapeutic support for asylum cases. Services will be offered sliding-scale, down to $1. We are not ending our telephonic clinic, which has served dozens and dozens of patients since its inception, but adding a collective of therapists and analysts committed to doing in-person, liberatory psychoanalytic work in Oakland. You can learn more about the collective, volunteer your time to it, or consider becoming a patient via our intake forms.
Next door, Parapraxis Books is the only psychoanalytic bookstore in the United States. Yes, Parapraxis magazine and its print projects will be available, but so will new and used psychoanalytic books in a half dozen languages. Come by, browse, or request a title.
The bookstore opens onto our educational space, home to everything we have built over the last five years: our biannual seminar, our book events, symposia, and our short courses. We will now have a physical space for film screenings, political education, to host winter and summer schools, and more. We know that we have a deeply international community of thinkers and students; most everything will remain in hybrid form. And absolutely everything will remain on offer sliding scale, down to free.
These twin pillars of praxis and theory have always been our guiding mission at The Psychosocial Foundation and in all our associated projects. Five years ago, we began to dream up this collective, imagining, through deep research and historical thinking, what it might mean to develop such a project here in Oakland in the 21st century. Through a generous gift from a private donor, we have secured our space in Uptown for five years. To make this space and its work all they can be, and to offer all it can to Oakland, and to stay there, we need your help. Today we launch the Muriel Gardiner Campaign.
Muriel Gardiner spent much of her fortune ensuring a future for left psychoanalysis at one of its most perilous hours. A psychoanalyst in her own right and a student of Freud’s, Gardiner is responsible for saving the lives and livelihoods of many of her comrades. Her story is singular, but this kind of active philanthropy was essential to the growth of left psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. It remains so.
Any amount will help us hire space and intake coordinators, expand our programming, and ensure we keep our spaces for those who will use them–all with an aim of making a sustaining therapeutic collective for Oakland. Those who pledge to donate annually for five years will receive a limited edition Psychosocial Foundation beach bag and a hand-picked book from the bookstore as a token of our gratitude. You can pledge here.
Come visit us at 1742 Franklin Street, Oakland during our open house on September 12, 12–6. The bookstore will be open, and we’ll have a marathon reading of more than a dozen Parapraxis contributors. Later that same night, we will be celebrating the launch of the collective and our space, as well as Parapraxis Issue 08: Groups, at Thee Stork Club. New York, we’ll see you for a party at Rodeo on Friday, October 2.
We hope to see you soon.
