Essays Archives | Page 9 of 12 | ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

TOXIC DRIP by Charles Rizzuto

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.)

STILL HERE by William W. Harris

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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?

SO I LISTEN by Abraham Velazquez, Jr.

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.

ON EDGE by Michael A. Diamond

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.”

NATIONAL HISTORIES AND IDENTITY by Daniel S. Benveniste

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.

A WINDOW IN by Elizabeth C. Evert

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.

AN EVANGELICAL’S PERSPECTIVE by Jacob Andrew Smith

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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.

HOPE, DESPAIR, AND UTOPIA by Isaac Tylim

EssaysBy admin October, 2019

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 CULTURING OF PSYCHOANALYSIS by Karim G. Dajani

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

PRESIDENTIAL STATES OF MIND by Frank Putnam

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

FRIENDLESS IN PALM BEACH by Sheldon Bach

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

A FAMILY ROMANCE by Jeri Isaacson

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

VAGINAL VERITAS by Jill Gentile

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

#USTOO, SIGMUND by Elizabeth Cutter Evert

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

THE FEMINIST FUTURE IS NONBINARY by Catherine Baker-Pitts

EssaysBy admin June, 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.

A LESBIAN LEANS IN by Ellen Marakowitz

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PERFORMANCE ART: GO FIGURE! by Aneta Stojnić

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

REVISITING A DREAM by Joan Golden-Alexis

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

A MAN WHO HATES WOMEN by Raquel Berman

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.

VENEZUELA: A PSYCHOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVE by Mireya Lozada

EssaysBy admin June, 2019

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.