The Margaret Morgan Lawrence Center for Family and Child Development
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 barriers to become the first licensed African American psychoanalyst in the U.S. For decades, she provided mental health services at the Harlem Hospital Center. She was also a renowned child psychiatrist, having studied under Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Lawrence centered the development of “ego strength”—what today we might refer to as resilience— rather than pathology in Black, brown, and poor communities. At the same time, she called on those working in the psychology field 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.
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.”—Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, daughter of Margaret Margaret Lawrence, in a book about her mother, Balm in Gilead.