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“To be stupefied,” Jared Russell explains in his provocative essay Stupidity, “is to regress in the face of the unexpected, to have one’s critical faculties paralyzed.” The contributors to Room 2.20 may be terrified and even heartbroken in the face of the unexpected, but they are not stupefied.
I relocated from San Francisco to Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1999, just one month after Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency. He presented himself as a socialist intent on helping the underclasses and ending corruption, and I was ready to sign up. In addition to my practice and teaching at Universidad Central de Venezuela and Universidad Católica Ándres Bello, I started writing a monthly article in the English-language newspaper under the title “The Psychology of Everyday Life,” addressing topics such as childrearing and adolescent issues.
In the Anglo-American world, men are brought up to value a body image that is hard, flat, and impermeable, more like a wall, whereas women are taught to value or at least be content with one that might be softer or more flexible and is certainly leaky, like a fence.
Donald Trump’s penchant for attacking his opponents by projecting onto them his own disavowed personal attributes and apparent self-assessments has been a consistent feature of his rhetorical style and remarked upon by many observers. For instance, in her recent book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Michiko Kakutani (2019) observes, “Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ ‘Crooked Hillary,’ ‘Crazy Bernie.’
In explicating the thought of Socrates, Nietzsche wrote that philosophy was an effort “to harm stupidity” (The Gay Science, §328). According to Nietzsche, humanism teaches us that it is our egotism that is to blame for our misery. Socrates taught the youth of Athens that it is our thoughtlessness that is to blame.
There is a psychic fissure in America’s exceedingly fragile democratic body politic. In the face of political tribalism and an awakened and reinvigorated far-right white nationalist movement in America, civil servants (nonelected career public servants) from the Departments of State, Defense, NSC, and elsewhere have come forward to testify truth to congressional power, attesting to the impeachable actions of the Trump administration—actions that depict a criminal and amoral public enterprise. These nonpartisan officials are bearing witness and speaking truth to power, regardless of whether siloed Republican representatives of the House and their counterparts in the Senate are willing to hear the critical testimony of federal bureaucrats.
When I was a little kid, I thought my uncle was hysterical. He told no jokes, but he didn’t treat me like a kid, either. He was always a problem for the rest of the family. At one point, my mother told me, “If people in suits come looking for your uncle, you don’t know where he lives.” Actually, he lived down the block. My uncle always had a job but never seemed to be working.
In the lead up to our anniversary issue, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Arnold Richards. A recipient of the 2000 Mary S. Sigourney Award and the 2013 Hans W. Loewald Memorial Award, Dr. Richards is a leading figure in the democratization of psychoanalysis and in bringing psychoanalysis to the world at large.
These abstract worlds are composed of undulations and vibrations that I define as beings. The cosmic forces that come together in the scenes find their impulse in the decomposition of modern dualism, in contemporary ways of relating to the world, and in a nature that does not faint in its eternal flourishing. In this way, Bloom emerges as a body of work in development, composed of small- and large-format artwork designed for both digital and analog media.
When I was a child in the Bronx in the 1940s, whenever a plan for the future was proposed, it would be followed by the phrase
“after the war.” My parents would say, “after the war” my father would quit Ritz radio and start his own business.
And then it was over. yes, he was finally impeached. >>> No, despite his claims to the contrary, he was not exonerated.
Today, we may be facing that same crisis, a different kind of sudden death. I feel both too old, at thirty-four, and not old enough to see history repeat itself.
There was no way I could have known when I went to Germany to interview the descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust for my film Afterward that this journey would take the form of a personal analysis. On the surface, I wanted to rid myself of my hatred for these Germans, who had done nothing wrong but whose ancestors tried to kill my people. I wanted to stop the cycle of hate
and othering before I passed it on to my own sons, to the next generation.
If the usual formula is that the negative affects hide in positive speech, overtly racist discourse flips the polarity, but the possibility that a racist discourse might hide a forbidden love, sexuality, or attachment is all too often ignored in clinical treatments that have been published.
Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (May 2019). A graduate of the New Directions program at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, she has been a member of the writing faculty there for a decade. She lives in Nashville.
Psychoanalysis—the word hung in my mind like a revelation. People could tune in to one another, literally the other (“al otro”), like a frequency. And when we’re on the same frequency, understanding can happen. And just like that, on a patio resting under the shadow of a great mango tree, psychoanalysis was born in Puerto Rico. At least, as far as my eight-year-old mind was concerned.
He was sprawled and cornered against his nightstand and tethered to the mattress by a tangle of bedclothes. Sleep anchored him, making it hard to stop his arms from thrashing. Blood and fire gagged his throat, blocking the scream. Panicked children. Mothers, naked, keening.
We have lost our grip on any shared sense of reality. Post-Truth philosophers provide cold comfort, telling us we haven’t really lost anything; we have, in fact, gained understanding that reality has never been there to grip. And the deconstructivists tell us that the credibility of any source (and we can include the post-truth philosophers here) is up for grabs. Any way you turn it, truth is subjective and personal. Truth is what we agree upon. Truth is tribal. ROOM 10.19 weaves together a few psychoanalytic truths. We do not hold these truths to be self-evident. Psychoanalytic truths are hard won.
The term “analytic action” assumes new complexity when we use it to enhance meaningful discourse about our unsettling and turbulent political reality. It opens doors to the possibility of kindling a deeper connection to parts of our psychoanalytic heritage, such as Freud’s free clinic movement. It brings to mind concerns expressed by early psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich, and Erich Fromm about the way sick societies produce troubled minds. Most importantly, it introduces two pressing questions. First, what issues occurring outside the consulting room demand analytic action? Second, what renders “action” outside the consulting room “analytic”?
Catcalls of NYC is a grassroots initiative and collective that uses public chalk art to raise awareness about gender-based street harassment. We solicit stories of harassment and their locations in New York City. Then, we go to those locations, write out the comments word-for-word in sidewalk chalk alongside the hashtag #stopstreetharassment…
Think back, if you will, to the halcyon days of the Reagan regime, with the Great Communicator’s elaborate economic agenda he called “trickle-down economics.” The alleged benefits never trickled down to most of us, and we know now that the whole thing was little more than a hoax disguising further wealth distribution upward. (We’ll put aside, for now, the fact that the current administration has once again duped the nation and resurrected this bogus plan with its recent tax cuts and other deep discounts for the wealthy and superwealthy.)
Well, it has been a little over a year, and he’s still here. I have stopped binge-watching TV, but he is still infecting my life. How can I ignore the Greenland saga or tune out the furious tears in response to the caged children or the empty chair at the G7 climate session?
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books —A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.
I remember my first time being at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis) and participating in their writing program, The Lyrical Circle. It was held in the space where we would be sharing and creating art for years to come. We met in a small room on the second floor of a beautiful brownstone in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem. The walls were radiant with bright yellows, and beautiful West African art decorated the room.
Abraham Velazquez Jr. is a youth worker at the Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis), an organization in Harlem that provides comprehensive, holistic, and long-term support services to youth who range in age from eight to twenty-two. He is also a cofounder of the Hip-Hop and poetry collective the Peace Poets, sharing art which responds to social and political crisis in over forty countries. Abraham earned his master of arts in educational theatre at New York University, where he studied theatre of the oppressed with Julian Boal, Barbara Santos, and Sanjoy Ganguly. In 2015, Abraham released his first solo album, A South Bronx Tale, engineered by Grammy Award recipient Mikaelin “Blue” Bluespruce.
Founded in 1995, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol provides comprehensive, holistic, and long-term support services to youth who range in age from eight to twenty-two. Bro/Sis offers wrap around evidence-based programming.
The organization focuses on issues such as leadership development and educational achievement, sexual responsibility, sexism and misogyny, political education and social justice, Pan-African and Latino history, and global awareness. Bro/Sis provides four- to six-year rites of passage programming, thorough five day a week after school care, school and home counseling, summer camps, job training and employment, college preparation, community organizing training, and international study programs to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
All of us work at the boundary. In fact, we work and live at multiple boundaries. We belong to numerous systems and relational networks. The idea of boundary is a metaphor for where and when we come into contact with each other as human subjects and objects —what Thomas Ogden calls “the primitive edge of experience.”
Anna Fishzon navigates one of the most recent groups of work by Patrick Webb: Intimacies. Placing us in the hands of Punchinello — the main character in Webb’s scenes — Fishzon guides the conversation through the communion of two souls: the artist’s and his alter ego’s.
Punchinello cautiously becomes the thread linking the evolution of two worlds, neither absolute nor separate, between the realities of the artist and his character.
From 1999 through 2010, I lived in Caracas, Venezuela. I arrived just after Hugo Chávez began his presidency, so I saw a rather vibrant Venezuela for several years before its subsequent deterioration under Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. As an immigrant, I saw Venezuela as an outsider, and at the same time, I could reflect on the United States from outside its borders.
As a magazine at the intersection of the psychological and the political, Room has published a number of articles that aim to explore the cultural divides in the US and beyond. In this vein, Jacob Smith has written a piece about being an Evangelical Christian in 2019, who cares deeply about humanitarian as well as spiritual issues.
As we approach another long election cycle in the United States, news outlets will be reporting on the political trends of evangelicals. It is often reported that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and they continue to remain faithful to him almost three years into the completion of his first term in office.
The 9/11 terrorist attack punctured America’s innocence, inflicting massive trauma on people across the country. Almost without delay, psychoanalysts felt compelled to shed their mantle of neutrality to better assist survivors, first responders, and those who were vicariously affected by the tragedy.
The Analyst stares into the steam of his green tea. Some of the more proactive flakes escape a tear in the frail nylon sachet, wending to the surface, a morning Rorschach for no one to interpret.
The first of his five patients for the day is out in the waiting room, flicking through one of the old copies of the LRB fanned out on the scuffed coffee table with splintered legs. After all, the Analyst wanted to make and maintain the right impression — urbane, intellectual, and playful were three adjectives he hoped crossed some folks’ minds some of the time.
Jane Lazarre’s most recent book is The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter, a memoir. Her first memoir, The Mother Knot, was recently published in Spain as El Nudo Materno. Other works include Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and the novels Inheritance and Worlds Beyond My Control. She has just completed a collection of poems, Breaking Light.
Polly Weissman is a mostly nonfiction writer who takes facts more seriously than is currently fashionable. She has published books for children and contributed to many textbooks. She is currently working on a novel about someone who keeps getting it wrong.
Democracy, psychoanalysis, and Room share a powerful connection. They were created to contain and facilitate the many voices that comprise (and conflict with) our polities, ourselves, and, in the case of Room, the space between ourselves and our societies. This is not coincidental. As Jill Gentile explains in her book Feminine Law, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, there is a resonance between the method of free association underlying the work of psychoanalysis and the right of free speech which is the bedrock of democracy.
This special edition of Room 6.19 Roundtable will be held in London on July 26 at the International Psychoanalytic Association Conference.
From my very first contact with psychoanalysis, a fascination in the theory and practice took hold of me. But becoming a psychoanalyst was a bit unimaginable. How would a lower-middle-class Palestinian immigrant navigate such a life goal? How could I possibly pay for years of analysis and navigate an environment I perceived as potentially hostile to me? I really did not know, but the calling did not subside.
In addition to the political controversies that they ignite, the contents of presidential tweets are subject to diverse statistical analyses as evidenced by postings on the internet.
Two years ago, an article in the New York Times1 about Donald Trump’s “friends” made me want to collect the little we know about such friendships, some or all of which may apply to Trump himself.
In mythology, in fairy tales, and in psychoanalysis, losing one’s sight often indicates that a disaster has occurred, an event so unbearable that it is no longer possible to look at it. Yet in the ongoing scourge that is the Trump administration, Trump cannot bear that we look away from the disaster.
Sara Mansfield Taber is the author of Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, the writer’s guide Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook, and two books of literary journalism. Her poetry, essays, travel, and opinion pieces have appeared in literary magazines such as The American Scholar and newspapers such as the Washington Post. A psychologist and social worker, she has taught creative nonfiction writing for twenty years.
In a recent interview1, Adam Phillips ventured the hypothesis that psychoanalysis was invented to address the problem of misogyny. This was a bold and unusual statement, and though we’ve long been initiated into Phillips’s refreshing, even scandalous, takes on often otherwise mundane or familiar assumptions, this seemed, at least to me, an astonishing statement, striking not because it was outlandish, but because it was utterly, perceptively true.
From time immemorial, there have been crimes committed by women who were driven to pursue their own power. These transgressive crimes center on the tearing down of established systems. They make it possible for us to reflect upon the meaning of the offenders, sacrifice in Euripides’s Bacchae: offenders who, beyond their frantic alienation, rise, as Medea did, through a reflective process that leads to a destruction that does not horrify them and that few of them repent.
I am writing in the spirit of #MeToo to bear witness to damage that has been done to a subset of women I have known personally in my thirty years of practice as a psychoanalyst, who felt pressured by the value placed on sexuality in the cultural milieu of the 1960s and, 70s and in the psychoanalytic circles they came to for help. I am also writing because I think these women’s stories offer a window into ways the mid-to-late-twentieth-century sexual revolution was experienced differently in various parts of the United States. This inquiry is part of a larger project, where I have been exploring ways to bridge cultural divides that block collaboration on a humanitarian political agenda.
City of Women is an encounter with the confusion about what happens to a woman’s body over her lifetime. We become divided subjects from the beginning — separated from the womb and ourselves in birth. Then the divided mind, now we become both subject and object, observer and the observed.
Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (May 2019).
I’m taken aback when Gloria Steinem, the “face of feminism,” announces on the Today show that she’s had “a little fat removed from above my eyes so I didn’t look like Mao Zedong.” Steinem is referring to the puffy-faced Chinese revolutionary who died in 1976, around the time when her model-thin figure was featured on a Manhattan billboard, erected by antagonists intent on reducing Steinem to her body.
At the 2019 Oscars, Period. End of Sentence won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The film, about fighting stigma against menstruation in rural India, marked the first time a film about menstruation made it to the Oscars stage.
Currently trauma is defined less in terms of the personal (the individual) and more in terms of the collective (the social-political) with its potentially insidious soul-destroying qualities. This is Maria Root’s concept of everyday or “insidious trauma.” Root here is referring to the “traumatogenic effects of oppression,” racism, marginalization, and hegemony.
Currently trauma is defined less in terms of the personal (the individual) and more in terms of the collective (the social-political) with its potentially insidious soul-destroying qualities. This is Maria Root’s concept of everyday or “insidious trauma.” Root here is referring to the “traumatogenic effects of oppression,” racism, marginalization, and hegemony.
As a psychoanalyst practicing in Mexico City, I have been thinking, writing and researching for decades about the unfathomable phenomenon of feminicide. The cultural, sociological, political, and economic complexities that have contributed to the killing of women are, I believe, intrinsically tied to the fundamental ideology of machismo.
José Vívenes is a Venezuela-based painter. His work reconsiders the gaze given to collective references. Vívenes assumes painting as a means of communication to reflect on the complex circumstances that his country, Venezuela, is going through.
My country has sunk into a complex humanitarian crisis led by a corrupt autocracy. From the laments of the millions of migrants who comprise the Venezuelan exodus around the world, to country-wide demands for food, medicine, and basic services, to the denunciations of human rights violations and the cries of political prisoners, Venezuela is in grave decline.
Cuatro Por Venezuela delivers medicine, food, and supplies to Venezuelans in need. Our volunteer-run organization distributes hundreds of packages to our trusted network of local NGOs, foundations, hospitals, rural community centers, senior facilities, orphanages, and schools.
Disordered was a collaborative, participatory street art project designed to destigmatize mental health challenges like depression and anxiety, and reframe health as a societal issue. The project took the form of conversations, stickers, signs, and a mural in public spaces around New York City. Through a combination of social practice and guerrilla strategies, Disordered intervened in public places, creating a space for personal interactions about the connections between mental health challenges and societal issues. It pushed ideas about how our history, culture, political, and economic systems affect our health in order to inspire personal, social, and political transformations.
How did I come to make a film about Dr. Vamik Volkan? The project arose from my experiences being a woman of a particular family rooted in the southern United States. As D.W. Winnicott said, home is where we start from.
Vamik Volkan was born in 1932 in a Turkish family on Cyprus, received his medical education in Turkey, and trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States. From a career in psychoanalysis in which he published many papers, he eventually found his way to creating a discipline in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to international conflict.
Special Issue on Trauma, Flight, and Migration. Edited by Marianne Leuzingerbohleber and Henri Parens.
ASSOCIATION FOR THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY: CALL FOR PAPERS > Displacement, Precarity & Community. Submissions are due by June 30, 2019. Rutgers University Continuing Education. Conference Center, New Brunswick, New Jersey. OCTOBER, 25-26,2019
Room 2.19 is about the powerful intrapsychic and geopolitical forces that threaten to hijack our minds, souls, and agency —and along with that, our communities and countries.
We will discuss with authors various topics arising from their pieces published in ROOM 2.19
Being involved in global violence prevention and dealing with genocides, gender-based violence, civil wars, and suicides, the last thing on my mind was domestic partisan politics.
I work at an agency in a central city in Israel that focuses on treating children who are survivors and perpetrators of sexual violence. The office has one bathroom with two private toilet rooms: a toilet without a toilet seat for men and a women’s bathroom.
Crossing borders in the recent past was probably less confusing and demanding than it is now. Institutions, social norms, and rituals made borders more rigid, and prior to the digital revolution and hyperglobalization, borders were more stable.
I am sitting in my office, thinking about rooms. Writing for Room has prompted this state of reverie, during which one of my favorite works, A Room of One’s Own, passes through my mind. In her essay, Virginia Woolf writes of the necessity for women to have money and a room of their own in order to write fiction.
A young man came to see me suffering from what he described as an “identity crisis.” He felt lost and didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. His family had fled from their country of origin during a time of war and could no longer return without the threat of imprisonment or death.
Mohamad Kebbewar was born and raised in Aleppo. Immigrating to Canada at age 19, Kebbewar earned a degree in history from Concordia University before becoming a graphic designer. He recently published a chapbook with JackPine Press entitled The Soap of Aleppo. He is putting the final touches on his novel The Bones of Aleppo.
Anne Sherwood Pundyk is a painter and writer based in Manhattan and Mattituck. Her recent solo exhibitions include Salena Gallery, LIU Brooklyn, NY; Adah Rose Gallery, Kensington, MD; and Christopher Stout Gallery, Bushwick, NY. A selection of her group exhibitions include, EMINENT DOMAIN, Chelsea, NY; VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY. Her artwork is in the collection of Barclays Bank, State Street Bank, The Luciano Benetton Foundation, Glamorise Foundations, Equity Residential, Marriott International, Katie Couric, Anthony Grant, Cy Twombly, Barry Hoggard and James Wagner among others in the US and Europe. Her paintings have been written about in artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, ART21 Magazine, ArtUS, ARTslant, Hamptons Art Hub, Art511 Magazine and The Washington Post.
I had a safe childhood growing up in Brezhnev-era Soviet Russia. My family was a rather typical one, according to the principle formulated by Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
I can thank Donald Trump for one thing and one thing only: he got me to read things I never would have read before. As my anxiety about his rhetoric kept increasing, Jason Stanley’s book On How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them convinced me my fear of a fascist government takeover was not so far-fetched under the right conditions…
Polly Weissman is a mostly nonfiction writer who takes facts more seriously than is currently fashionable. She has published books for children and contributed to many textbooks. She is currently working on a novel about someone who keeps getting it wrong.
Two protestors stand side by side—one black, the other white. The black figure holds a sign that reads “I Can’t Breathe”; the white figure holds a sign that reads “I Can’t See.” I am the youngest daughter of Jack (an orphan) and Rose Fine, who was the youngest of eighteen children, both Jewish refugees from Poland.
In the fall semester of 2016, PHIL 410 met on Wednesdays, in the Campbell-Meeker seminar room, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. It was my first upperclassman seminar, as well as my first course with Alexandra Bradner, who would later become my faculty advisor.
McKenzie Stojnić is an NYC-based media performance group composed of Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stojnić. Their work operates at the intersections of art/life, theory/practice, and episteme/doxa through talks, lecture performances, comics, videos, texts, and workshops.
Yes, there was a blue wave in November 2018, but many of the races were achingly close. Even factoring in the distortions of gerrymandering, the country is torn. As a liberal New York psychoanalyst who has spent time in Christian — including Evangelical — circles, I think we on the left have difficulty understanding how frequently we are seen as hypocritical in the moral sphere.
In all obvious ways, I am not an outsider. I am not isolated from the majority by dint of my sexual orientation, skin color, class, religion, disability, or appearance— all the notable and painful ways one can become marginalized.
Room’s definition of itself as a “sketchbook of psychoanalytic action” got me thinking: What is psychoanalytic action? Is it action informed by considerable analysis of all its components and determinants?
Mind of State is a new weekly podcast where politics and psychology meet. Each episode features lively commentary on current events, policymakers, and the body politic, and how we have arrived at this moment, as observed through both a political and psychological lens. Mind of State explores how “mind” impacts “state” — and vice versa…
Before I read this book, which I heard about not long after it was published in 2013, I thought it would turn out to be a worthy effort to apply psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary thinking to the nightmare subject of climate change.
The writing is clear on the wall and has been for some time now for anyone open to facts. Demographics in the US all speak to the demise of the Republican Party as currently constituted.
It has been over a year that I had sent you my piece “Playing with Guns” after attending a church Halloween Festival for children that had many games centered around toy guns. I am happy to report that Blacksburg Christian Fellowship has made changes to its Halloween celebration.
“Bravery,” Coline Covington, a psychoanalyst living in London, told me last spring, “exists in the eyes of the beholder. No one who has done something…
The Flores settlement mandates that children be detained no longer than twenty days. The administration is proposing to change this, and the Department of Homeland Security has proposed an indefinite detention period…
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action was created in 2017 in response to a bewildering and frightening political reality…
The world listens as Donald Trump, President of the United States, on a state visit to the United Kingdom bemoans the fact that Prime Minister…
Politics is about power — who has it and who doesn’t. Politics is also about ethics, fairness, justice, and governing assumptions about the state of nature…
William Blake was outraged by the idea of a bird in a cage, it being a violation of the natural order. One can only imagine what he would think…
Eugene Mahon, MD, is training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books—A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.
Engaging with marginalized social histories and recognizing the psychic consequences these histories hold for the treatment dyad poses a challenge for psychoanalysis…
In the summer of 2016, several IPTAR clinicians began to meet with administrators at the International Rescue Committee to discuss forging a partnership in which IPTAR therapists would provide pro bono services to IRC clients who are refugees resettling in NYC.
Lately, a dream I had twelve years ago has been coming back to me. I dreamt that my four-year-old son (he’s sixteen now) was buried neck deep in the middle of a neighborhood and surrounded by modest houses…
I paint to create a space “to be,” a space to reflect and connect me back to the physical world. My images spring when I pause to be “in the moment” and absorb where I am and what’s happening. When making cursory sketches or snapshots, I’m drawn especially to characteristics that transcend time and exist outside of narrative and that mix the everyday and the transcendent, the scripted and the spontaneous.
Rachel Neve-Midbar, MFA, is the author (under the name Heimowitz) of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Prairie Schooner, and Georgia Review. She was recently a finalist for the COR Richard Peterson Prize, winner of the Passenger Prize, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Rachel completed her MFA at Pacific University in 2015 and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California.
“Nigger take this! Take it, I tell ya!” Howard yells at the black carhop. It is 1951 in Macon, Georgia. I am eight years old. My brother, Toby, is six. We are in the back seat of a 1948 Ford. I am cringing. I do not know what Toby…
For all of its potential to do good, psychoanalysis has tended to focus on problems that can be narrowly viewed as stemming from intrapsychic and familial problems…
What happened to the party of the working class? When did the Democratic party become a party that neglects the poor? When did politicians stop fighting for economic equality…
As a young candidate transferring from the field of performing arts and theory into psychoanalysis, I am struck by their provocative resonances. In addition to theoretical connections, I have noticed between psychoanalysis and performing arts/performance studies…
The “fourth wall” is a technical device used by actors. It works in the following way: Actors choose a spot in the back of the theater, internalize it, and move on with the action, bypassing the potential interference of….
There has been a curious omission in the public debate following Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on allegations of sexual assault…
This conference takes up the issue of Transformations in relation to the fears currently contaminating our visions of the future…
Kaja Weeks is a poet and essayist who often writes of music and healing. In addition to being a graduate of New Directions: Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge, Weeks maintains a career as a clinic-based developmental music educator, which integrates the work of Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder. When young children’s ability to engage and grasp verbal language is compromised, she harnesses the power of vocalizations and relational rhythms to elicit communicative interaction.
Room never knows where the next submission will come from. With every essay, poem, photograph, image of art, piece of music, or description of activism…
When our yoga teacher first taught us to visualize the space between two joints in our body and then to breathe into that space to open it up, we followed her instructions avidly…
I’m in a dissociated state. Other people might say I’m numb, robotic, going through the motions, “not all there.” But I’m a psychotherapist, so I recognize this sense…
The news about Venezuela is as alarming as it is strange. Each day brings a new mix of tragedy and absurdity. Venezuela is no longer a country…
A girl scavenges for food in the streets of Caracas. From 2014 to 2017, a visual essay about the starvation crisis in Venezuela by the photojournalist Federico Parra.
I got on an M train, thinking it was an F train, I wasn’t paying attention, and rode it out to Williamsburg by mistake. I looked up from the story I was reading about two mathematicians, one of them losing his mind, where am I…
Dreams, words, ideas, memories, contradictions—all of it is wrapped together in your feelings. The moment of leaving nears. The departure is certain…
Trump. I am discombobulated because of Trump. I binge watch TV – not Fox, MSNBC. He has infected everything: my dreams, my conscious, my unconscious, dinners with my family, my work.
As I thought about the horror of separating young children from their families at the U.S. border, what came to mind was the London bombings during World War II…
A young woman from Namwon known for her virtue captured the unwanted attention of the newly installed magistrate who was arrogant, cruel, and narcissistic…
Sylvia Flescher is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her paper “Googling for Ghosts” grew out of her long-standing participation in New Directions and was published in the Psychoanalytic Review. In it, she describes the powerful effect on her of her mother, Anna, being honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations.
This conference takes up the issue of Transformations in relation to the fears currently contaminating our visions of the future…
Mariño’s work evokes the privation and moans of those who suffer a deep crisis similar to the post-war artistic expressions…
We cannot just cross our arms presented with this tragedy. Venezuela needs your help.
IPTAR’s Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program and The Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Program thank over 147 representatives across The United States for cosponsoring Congresswoman Rosa Delauro’s resolution: H. Res. #927…
We will discuss with authors various topics arising from their pieces published in ROOM 2.18
Leah Lipton, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and collage artist in New York City. She is a supervisor at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) and a faculty member at ICP and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center (PPSC).
Anniversaries exist as a demand to remember and, as such, they have a great deal in common with the work of psychoanalysis. Looking back from the vantage of ROOM’s first anniversary, it is amazing to recall that ROOM might not have happened at all but for a fortuitous accident.
When I was asked to write a piece for this newsletter on the subject of play, work/life balance or the analyst at play, I began gathering materials as I usually do in my writing process, and then I wait and see what thoughts begin to germinate…
Sara Mansfield Taber is the author of Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, as well as essays, social commentary, and literary journalism. A psychologist and social worker, she has taught creative nonfiction writing for twenty years. Chance Particulars: A Writers Field Notebook for Travelers, Bloggers, Essayists, Memoirists, Novelists, Journalists, Adventurers, Naturalists, Sketchers, and other Notetakers and Recorders of Life will be published May 2018.
At first, their silence made me wonder if I had overreacted to the presence of toy guns at the church event due to my experience with gun violence. My husband, Jamie Bishop, was murdered during the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007, the deadliest school shooting in US history.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010) won the Juniper Prize and was published in 2010. Her fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2018. Recent poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. Seuss was raised in rural southwest Michigan. ‘Still Life With Dictator’ originally appeared in Crab Creek Review.
On October 14, 2017, I moderated an event called “Duty to Warn” in New York City. The event was one of several held nationally on that day. The topic was on the psychological fitness of Donald Trump to hold the office of president of the United States. The proximate reason…
I wish I knew exactly what drew me in. I do recall what I brought: a bullet and my late husband’s dried wedding boutonniere. Melissa Ichiuji, the workshop teacher, was afraid the bullet could explode easily. I reassured her it wouldn’t. I just never imagined something solid could explode without impact.
For a while after I came to the U.S. in August 2016, I continued to have dreams which seemed to show that although I had physically moved to the U.S., my mind still needed time to catch up to that move. In those dreams, I missed my flight to New York because I arrived late to the airport, or I didn’t get ready to leave for…
This collage was made as I was transitioning, from film making to psychoanalysis. It is torn
up road maps of everywhere I have ever lived.
The publication of Diane Seuss’s poem, “Still Life with Dictator”, in this issue of ROOM made me think of another poem about another dictator which appeared in circumstances very different from these. I refer to the poem on Stalin…
The folks in the images appearing with this essay hold the traumas of racism, immigration, natural disaster and genocide. I show these faces because they reflect experiences of trauma so many of us Americans contain, directly or intergenerationally. I point to these images also to reflect on the ongoing fact that Donald Trump and his supporters’ aggressive words, policies and actions
against these already vulnerable people — against what is vulnerable in us all — has been traumatizing or re traumatizing for far too many.
We will discuss with authors various topics arising from their pieces published in ROOM 2.18
“Political” is part of a series of experimental paintings which are mediations on the concepts of transience and impermanence. Specifically, I am interested in the “mono_ no_ aware” state. The bittersweet appreciation of a moment or as some say the ahh-ness of the experience.
It is hard to be deluged with requests to donate between now and Nov. 2018. But it’s so important. We are asking for donations of ten dollars.
IPTAR: THE LJGOULD CENTER FOR SYSTEMS-PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES | Citizen Forum | One Year Later.
THIS BODY OF WORK EMERGES following the death of my mother. Driven to find what is within, as an artist and psychoanalyst, and now as a motherless child, I become aware that the very effort is based on questions without answers. No amount of digging, desire or toil will let me penetrate what is inside (the Unconscious, the Body, Death). I listen as a psychoanalyst, dig and mold and craft as an artist. I am in the presence of what is no longer living, yet that which still seems to be animated, undergoing transformation.
It feels impossible to begin this introduction to Room 9.17 without mentioning the attack in Charlottesville even though, by the time you read this, that horrific August weekend will likely be occluded by whatever will have happened next. ROOM is not a blog. It is not a tweet. It is not a newsletter at one with the news. ROOM is a re-occurring place of reflection…
The day in April that Ivanka Trump appeared on the dais with Angela Merkel at the Women’s Summit in Berlin, I was in my office. I was listening to a vibrant and astute young woman in her twenties as she confessed, a little sheepishly, that her new shirt had “trendy” sleeves…
Our first Room Roundtable was held on June 11, 2017 with approximately 20 people in attendance…
We are grateful to both Leni and Samera for letting us share their words publically and for giving us the idea of having a ‘Letters to ROOM’ section. The creation of ROOM is an unfolding process between the editorial team and the community…
The presenters will discuss the political and sociological dynamics of populism from a psychoanalytic perspective…
For the previous issue of ROOM, I contributed a piece that argued against the idealization of tolerance, diversity and understanding that I see so many in the psychoanalytic community currently engaged in. I’m aware that some readers…
Due to the current political and social hostilities that surround us everyday I felt compelled to create a piece that was inclusive and stressed…
Eugene Mahon M.D., is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic. His articles have been published widely in major psychoanalytic journals. His books include A Psychoanalytic Odyssey: Painted Guinea Pigs, Dreams, and Other Realities (Karnac, 2014), Rensel the Redbit: A Psychoanalytic Fairy Tale (Karnac,2015) and a volume of poetry, Bone Shop of the Heart (IPBooks, 2017).
There was a time when I thought that two words—gay and lesbian— and therefore two letters—g and l— sufficed. I now know—in fact I think I always did—that the words gay and lesbian never really did justice to the exceedingly complex variability…
“…I sit in my Manhattan apartment feeling elated and full, perhaps because a woman has been nominated as the VP candidate and it feels as though anything is possible…
Diane Seuss is a poet whose most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, (U. of Ma. Press, 2010) won the Juniper Prize. Her fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2018. She has published widely in literary magazines including Poetry, The Iowa Review, and The New Yorker. Diane lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
A patient in her early thirties recently admitted that she hadn’t voted, yet again…
If these little drawings were simpler, if they focused on color or form, they might be more likely to be understood for their essential character. They might inspire something…
IPTAR: THE LJGOULD CENTER FOR SYSTEMS-PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES | Citizen Forum | Riding the Waves of a Changing World.
From 1934 -1945, the Rundbriefe was a top secret newsletter that circulated among a small group of socially and politically committed refugee psychoanalysts. Otto Fenichel, its founder and one of Freud’s most eminent followers, urged this small group of analysts not to isolate themselves…
IPTAR’S PARTNERSHIPS: SANCTUARY FOR FAMILIES, NEW YORK. Service provider and advocacy organization for victims of domestic abuse…
IPTAR’S PARTNERSHIPS: PILOT PROGRAM WITH REFUGEES, NEW YORK. A growing group of IPTAR members and psychology interns and externs have been involved…
Susan Katz is a photographer, writer, and psychotherapist in private practice in NYC, NY.
In the epigraph, Jimi Hendrix’s poetic alter-ego expresses skepticism in regard to being seen and heard. Does he pose a question: “Can you see me?”; a demand: “Can you see me!”; or perhaps a plea: “Can you see me…please”?…
Joan V. L iebermann is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, DC and a clinical faculty member at the George Washington University School of Medicine.
Currently based in Brooklyn, Violette Bule studied at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía in Mexico City and holds a Diploma in General Studies from the Centro Nacional de la Fotografía in Caracas. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Tokyo Wonder Site…
When I got ready to see patients on the morning of November 9th, I wanted to wear a hoodie to work. My army green hoodie is something I reserve for errands and weekends, but that post-election morning…
I try to rise up each time the pits of Trump fears and anger draw me down. Many people speak of the tangle of old fears…
Ani Buk is a Training Analyst and on Faculty at the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Graduate Art Therapy Program of New York University, as well as the Kint Institute, a post-graduate program focused on the use of the creative arts therapies to treat traumatized populations.
Since the election of T as president many people who can see nothing positive in him whatsoever, either as human being or politician…
In the weeks after 9/11 the IPTAR Clinical Center received a grant to fly in mental health professionals from Ireland, the Middle East, and South America to talk about the experience
of doing psychoanalysis in the midst of existential terror. Hundreds of therapists practicing in New York came…
Arlene Richards is a training and supervising analyst at IPTAR and poet. Her most recent book is Myths of Mighty Women. (Karnac 2015).
IPTAR: THE LJGOULD CENTER FOR SYSTEMS-PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES | Citizen Forum | Riding the Waves of a Changing World.
I try to rise up each time the pits of Trump fears and anger draw me down. Many people speak of the tangle of old fears…
Eugene Mahon is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic. His forthcoming volume of poetry BONE SHOP OF THE HEART is in press with IPBooks.
Sitting down to write these words on Inauguration Day felt like the exact right thing to be doing. For this is another inaugural — of ROOM. Perhaps we can even…
An eighty-four year old woman who has been in therapy for years for chronic anxiety has a satisfying and still thriving career, a solid marriage…
When I got ready to see patients on the morning of November 9th, I wanted to wear a hoodie to work. My army green hoodie is something I reserve for errands and weekends, but that post-election morning…
With 25.4% of the United States population identifying as Evangelical Christian, and with 81% of Evangelicals voting for Trump, we cannot afford Freud’s attitude quoted here in the left side bar. Where religious…
