Despite efforts to broaden the focus of school safety provision beyond eliminating individual problematic students, interventions in school contexts have traditionally focused on helping the troubled child adapt to the school; less often do schools view the child's symptoms as reflecting troubles in the community which in turn impact children. Even the “school climate” approach, which is innovative in viewing the child in light of social influences contributing to identity and affective co-regulation, may not sufficiently illuminate the interactions among neurobiology, teaching methods, family support/networks, organizational systems, and cultural/political disruptions. In this article, we focus on Cohen and Rappaport’s complementary papers on preventing school violence. Although both papers thoughtfully consider individual and school-climate factors, a common feature in both is the replication of our cultural tendency to split the psychic domain from the social realm—to favor approaches that emphasize individual psychopathology over ones that view the individual and community as inextricably linked and mutually constitutive (Layton, 2020). Models for assessment often unconsciously favor frameworks for understanding individuals' symptoms as opposed to approaches that view symptoms as expressing the needs and troubles of both the individual and the community. We propose that the dialectical relationship between individual and community is the nexus from which we can understand the impact of family and community distress on individual psychopathology in ways that could culminate in a violent incident. We will explore how, in the context of Cohen's policy proposals and Rappaport's case study, a community psychoanalytic model can mobilize different interventions and resources.