Coming Fall 2025

Innovative community mental health services in Harlem

Harlem residents often struggle to find therapists, much less any who share their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, because of a lack of trustworthy clinics and licensed professionals serving the neighborhood—which has some of the highest rates of mental illness in the city.

The Margaret Morgan Lawrence Center for Family and Child Development, opening this fall, will offer psychoanalytic-based therapy and modern treatments by professionals, including ketamine treatment and psychodynamic therapy, that reflect Harlem’s diversity. It will also host community events. Led by the Rev. Sheila Johnson, one of only a few dozen African American psychoanalysts in the U.S., the center will become a cornerstone of the community.

A Pioneering Black Female Psychoanalyst

The Center is named for Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, who overcame racial and gender barriers to become the first African American woman pediatrician and the first African American psychoanalyst in the United States. For decades, Dr Lawrence served as Chief of Developmental Psychiatry Services for Children at the Harlem Hospital Center where she arrived in 1940 as a pediatric resident after graduating from Columbia School of Medicine, the only black student and one of ten women to enter in 1936. At Harlem Hospital she became rapidly politicized.  Along with other young doctors, she became an outspoken activist for better medical care for the poor and became involved in national and international movements for peace and justice. In 1941, at Columbia’s School of Public Heath, Benjamin Spock was an inspired and forceful mentor. Dr Lawrence went there to study epidemiology and instead emerged with an interest in joining pediatrics and psychiatry.  After a three-year stint teaching pediatrics and public health at all-black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee (where she suffered discrimination as the only woman physician) Margaret returned to New York to do a residency in child psychiatry and train in psychoanalysis—the first and only African American to matriculate through both programs.

Dr. Lawrence centered the development of “ego strength” (what today we might refer to as resilience, the strength to thrive) rather than pathology in Black, brown, and poor communities. At the same time, she called on those serving as clinicians, researchers, and community workers to confront “the legacy of poverty, racism and dehumanization.”

“We defend ourselves for our lack of success with the belief that our precious tools, such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis do not apply for the poor and minorities in our population. I call upon those engaged in work on the hills and in the bottoms of our land to join in using their disciplines and themselves as tools to bring into relief our own resources,” she wrote in her book Young Inner City Families which chronicled her work and mined the insights she gained through her pioneering contributions to the families and community of Harlem.

Lawrence, who died in 2019 at the age of 105 in New York City, was instrumental in founding the Harlem Family Institute (the parent organization of Harlem Family Services), which has sought to diversify the psychoanalytic profession.

“Her mind is poetic and playful, not literal or analytic; she rarely follows strict chronology, rarely remembers dates but never forgets history. She speaks directly from feelings, from emotional content. Her mind puts things together that others see as disparate or unconnected. She can make patterns from stray remnants of all shapes and colors. Hers is an intelligence exquisitely suited to a psychoanalyst who must help the patient integrate fragments of history, gathering loose threads from the distant past.”—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, daughter of Margaret Morgan Lawrence, in an intimate biography of her mother, Balm in Gilead: Journey of A Healer.