Why “The Alamo”?

The name of our group practice comes from our building—a 120-year-old structure in the Garvanza district of Highland Park. This special place grounds our work.

The building came with the name. The original footprint of the building was modeled after the Alamo in San Antonio, a place with its own pained and complex history. It first opened as a city lending library in July 1904, and served in that capacity until the Arroyo Seco Branch Library opened in 1913. More recently, the building was home to the Danish Soldiers Society, a social club celebrating Danish culture. (That’s the origin of the triangle-shaped sign hanging on the building with the modified Danish flag and “DSS.”)

We struggled with how to honor the building’s longheld neighborhood identity as “the Alamo,” without glamorizing the violent history that the original Texas site represents. It begs the question, if we can’t change the past and we can’t erase it, how do we make use of it—particularly the parts we find most shameful? This is where psychoanalysis offers us a way through, a way of making use of the old rather than discarding it. While there are certain facts we will never be able to change, we can continue to evolve and redefine our relationship to that history. There’s something fitting about practicing in a space that has accumulated its own layers of complex meaning, its own unconscious. Like the talking cure itself, the building suggests that what endures often does so not despite its age, but because of what time has allowed it to become.

—Michelle Harwell, Founder