Looking into the Face of the Gorgon by Dana Amir and Azz a-Din

Essays

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?

Our Children: Discarded, Disdained, and Destroyed by Jyoti M. Rao

Essays

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 Seen and the Unseen: AI’s Disquieting Impact by Xiaomeng Qiao

Essays

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

We Say “Never Forget” by Tom Hennes

Essays

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.

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FROM AN OTHER PERSPECTIVE by Fang Duan

Essays

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.

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ANCESTRAL SPACES by Marcia Black

Essays

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?

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski

LEARNING FROM CHICKENS by Linda Emanuel

Essays

It had been an unseasonably hot day in July. The news said—improbably, I felt—that it didn’t break a record. The fifteen chickens in the coop next to me panted through their open beaks, spread their wings to create shade, or moved within the stingy shadows, one pecking the neck of another to get a place to scratch down to cooler earth.

Photo by Annie Spratt

POLLUTION: THE CASE OF INDIA by Shreya Varma

Essays

Early in January 2020, while anxiously speaking to a colleague, I was thinking about how I have become dysfunctional. I obsessively read everything. My panic-stricken and recurring thoughts about the state of my country, my home, were haunting me like a waking nightmare. My colleague at the time responded and said, “That’s how everyone is. Panic and dysfunction are not a pathology of the individual anymore. You are not alone.”

Photo by Umut Rosa/Shutterstock.com

GRIEF SUSPENDED IN EXPLOSION by Lara Sheehi

Essays

Karachi is underwater. They say the flooding is devastating. They speak as though it is constitutive of the people of Karachi to suffer, that they just can’t imagine another way of being: hardship, plight, poverty. 1948 is all that comes to mind. Partition. Colonialism. But nineteen years and counting: Afghanistan, that is how Pakistan exists to them, a mere association.

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FAULT LINES, BLIND SPOTS, & OTHERNESS by Dinah M. Mendes

Essays

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been seismic in its exposure of systemic cracks and flaws across the spectrum. Assumptions about what once felt relatively predictable in terms of health and economic safety, job and educational security, and expectations for the future have been upended by the destructive course of the virus. And at the national level, in the equally unpredictable convergence of events that determine historical moments, the fault lines of foundational and transgenerational racism that undergird our country have been highlighted.

Artwork by Franzi /Shutterstock.com

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE COMMUNITY by Caroline Volel

Essays

I am not yet an analyst. I am a pediatrician for urban public schools and state-regulated behavioral health facilities. In my current capacity, I address the medical needs of hundreds of minority kids and families who are excluded from traditional psychoanalytic culture but who could deeply benefit from this healing art. Every day, I witness both the need for psychodynamic applications on a programmatic scale and imagine possibilities for public health partnerships to enable this process.

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COLLECTIVE DISAPPEARANCE by Rocío Barcellona

Essays

I feel as if I’ve been punched in the throat. Being treated like a person is scary here. One must then recognize that one is indeed a person, which then makes one aware of the inhumane realities of this place. I thought I understood then. But as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, I got an even better understanding…

Photo by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation | Azez, Aleppo.

WAR AND PANDEMIC IN ALEPPO by Mohamad Kebbewar

Essays

Danger during the war in Aleppo was marked with sound and smoke. During the pandemic, danger is boundless. It can be everywhere and anywhere. The most fashionable and well-off person can carry the virus and pass it on to me, while on the other hand, an armed person walking next to me on the sidewalk could be harmless. The invisible danger is what makes the virus lethal. In war, if the sound is far away, then I can assume I am safe.

Photo by Matthew Roth

FIRE AND ICE IN PORTLAND by Raphael Ogusz, Maryam Omidi, and Omer Leshem

Essays

Portland protesters armed with leaf blowers and cardboard signs face off with masked federal agents sporting fatigues and riot gear—guns, truncheons, and shields. Orange tear-gas clouds plume up from the tarmac as the agents grab protesters and hurl them into unmarked cars. These are images typically associated with far-off, war-torn countries ruled by authoritarian regimes—not democratic governments. But in less than six months, some of the most toxic elements of the US national psyche have risen to the surface, denuded by the global pandemic and bull-horned across the country by the divisive and belligerent rhetoric of the White House.

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LETTERS FROM LOCKDOWN by Tiffany Chu

Essays

Last week, I dug up a box of my parents’ old letters. They were written before my parents were married, while my mom was still in Taiwan and an ocean away from my dad in the United States. A surprising number of the letters were in English; the writing is stilted, and it’s clear that English is neither of my parents’ first language, but the mundane recounting of their days felt somehow both endearing and sacred. Holding the tangible artifacts of my parents’ courtship in my hands, I imagined for the first time the twentysomethings they were when they wrote those letters.

Graphic by ADELART/ Shutterstock.com

Letter from Pittsburgh by Miriam DeRiso

Letters

Yesterday, my phone rang early in the morning. The voice on the other end of the line whispered, with strain, “I’m sorry. I came home for spring break, and I won’t be returning to Pittsburgh for a while. I don’t know what we can do. Is there anything we can do?”

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Letter from New York by Kate Muldowney

Letters

I thought I’d share some thoughts I wrote earlier today. By way of explanation, I started my career as a young social worker at the outset of the AIDS crisis in the United States. These weeks have so reminded me of those early days of AIDS: the fear, terror, and confusion. After working in pediatric HIV in the Bronx for eight years, I was able to travel to visit schools and orphanages in East Africa numerous times. I witnessed firsthand the destruction that HIV…

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Letter from Paris by Julia-Flore Alibert

Letters

I would like to share with you my short experience doing video sessions with children from ages four to fifteen during this troubled period. I still work in my office, which is in a part of my home, so they can see me and the office on the video. Most of the children have chosen to continue the therapy. I tell the parents to let their child stay in a quiet room alone…

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Letter from Seattle by Adriana Prengler

Letters

In the Seattle suburbs (where I live), people stay at home, as in most cities in the world, except for outings for groceries, to the pharmacy, and for walks or biking on trails. My state (Washington State) has not officially declared a lockdown yet, even though there are many infected and many fatalities, especially among the elderly. As many others have described, I initially consulted with my patients about the possibility of continuing their treatment…

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Letter from Jerusalem by Viviane Chetrit-Vatine

Letters

Since last Monday, I have been working by phone, going through my regular schedule. All my patients in analysis are very well and responding to this situation. My patients who were in face-to-face psychotherapy are discovering how speaking on the phone allows them freer expression. But obviously this mean of communication…

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Letter from Bucharest by Daniela Andronache

Letters

In Romania, the coronavirus has only sickened less than three hundred (tested) people so far, and nobody has died until today. Our population seems to understand pretty well the recommendations of going out only for strict necessities. And yet, over these last couple of weeks, in the sessions with all my patients, I have begun to immensely appreciate the life experience…