The watermelon gesture asked me to loosen my ideas about what unconscious communication should look like. A person living under the threat of displacement also has desires, fantasies, defenses, ambivalence, humor, aggression, and a rich inner world. Community psychoanalysis asks us to remain attentive to this complexity, especially when the urgency of helping tempts us to believe that we already understand.
When I was able, finally, to hold both emotions at once, I remember the instant sensation of gentle stillness, muscle fibers giving up their tension. There was space to choose, to respond. For the first time, I understood freedom.
It was January 2023. Life in Afghanistan had become unbearably difficult for girls. For us, education was not just about books or classrooms. It was our only path to freedom, to dreams, to proving to our community that we too could build our country alongside our brothers. For me, school was more than a building; it was a sanctuary of hope. I dreamed of becoming a doctor, of healing the sick and giving families a reason to believe in tomorrow.
My parents, roaring inside me, showed me that when you are dismayed by something offensive, and unconscionable in the world, you pounce into action. You do not pause to sit and muse or cogitate. You know. You feel. You hurl yourself in.
There is a big difference between a bird that has always been inside a cage and a bird that has tasted freedom and then is forced back inside.
I had asked myself, if I choose silence, if I closed my mouth and quietly endured oppression, would the world even notice? The answer was no. That’s why I promised myself that now was the time to speak up—to accept the risks.
I know not what
A mother can say
To a daughter
Who was ripped from her
Before they’d barely begun
The long alliance usual to a mother and child
“Why do you Chinese need psychoanalysis?” The question came from my instructor at the Chicago Institute, delivered not with malice but with genuine curiosity. “Don’t you have Buddhism, Taoism, all these ways to regulate mental health?” I remember the silence that followed. The other Chinese trainees and I exchanged glances across the Zoom screen—yes, we were among the first to train remotely, Chicago being notorious for its large Chinese population. The question hung in the virtual air like smoke, and I found myself nodding slowly, thinking: He’s right. He’s absolutely right.
have you seen an apocalypse not in a movie but on the streets outside your window have you smelled the air of a chaos tamed by the weapons of armed soldiers have you heard of the silenced screams of the medical workers who were also civilians amongst civilians have you tasted the blood of either of these two murderers—COVID and Coup
When a postcard arrived from a friend, I was in my late teens, living in the passive-aggressive air of the bright grey sky in a tiny room in Kobe. The picture on the postcard was seemingly drawn hastily in a graffiti-like style in pale pastel colours. In it, a woman in pyjamas with dark, messy hair is sitting on a single bed, slightly hunched over and covering her mouth with her hands. She appears lost in thought, blankly bemused, as she stares at an open suitcase in front of her, waiting to be filled, with piles of books lying next to it. From her strangely impassive face, I heard an inaudible voice oozing out—“What shall I do?”
The floors are red, not as a metaphor, not as a political statement; they are red. And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red? Are we made of the same substance, the same suffering, the same divine breath that once stirred a man’s lungs? If so, why do we die like vermin, why does the world avert its eyes while we rot in plain sight? Why does the hunger of a single hostage shake the souls of nations, while the emaciated bodies of a million children elicit only polite disbelief?
Such desires must be obfuscated. Indeed, in the face of blatant refusal to protect children, which amounts to relentless aggression against them, we find psychoanalytically curious invocations of protection amidst active harm, a phenomenon observable in abusive families and troubled intrapsychic environs alike. ‘Protective custody’ results in incarcerated children—another pause-worthy phrase that describes a violation of children’s rights per the Convention—languishing alone in solitary confinement for their ostensible protection in adult prisons.
The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that makes us vulnerable.
What I found particularly powerful was the sense of empowerment AI creation gave me. Suddenly, I could produce sophisticated visual art, compose music, or generate text that previously would have required years of technical training. This empowerment had a liberating effect on my psychoanalytic process, allowing me to externalize complex emotional states more rapidly and in more varied forms
I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service by rallying around the cry of Never Forget when that cry means we should never forget precisely those things that prevent us from knowing the traumas that others have experienced, perhaps even at our own hands—the ways that our good may have been their bad, or could become so, even without our knowledge or consent.
At first, I did not know why I was weeping inconsolably upon seeing the image of George Floyd’s naked face as his neck was crushed by the knee of a man fully armed with police gear and, more strikingly, a look of total nonchalance. I did not know why I could not bear watching the video of one human, so unmoved, with such ease, squeezing the life out of another human being who was squirming, pleading, begging, calling for his momma.
What if our patients who “feel too much” aren’t just poorly regulated but are sensing something more that needs to be told? What if our patients who have been called “too sensitive” really are resonating with a more collective grief than their own? What if they have capacities and sensitivities that overwhelm them because no one has believed them and trained them how to use them? What if they feel “different” from others, not just because of trauma, or neuropsychological differences, but because they are carriers of old truths, of memories from before their time?
We can all—or most of us—agree on the existence of a thing called structural racism. But can structures have a life of their own, independent of the people inside them?