These Words

That’s how it started
And I don’t know how it will end.
But still, from beyond the valley,
From the pain, and from distance
We shall forever go on calling out
to each other: “We’ll change.” . 

—“These Words,” Yehuda Amichai (translated from
the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes)

Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.

 

 

In You Know How Mami y Papi Get, Eliza Jaquez finds ways to enliven the dry universality of psychoanalytic concepts. She describes being stopped in her tracks by a term like “object relations”: “This (psychoanalytic) language palette is significantly muted when compared to the vibrant magentas coating my English or the bursts of flamingo pink saturating my Spanish,” she writes, “but once I walk through that linguistic portal, my homegrown blend of Spanish serves as a reminder that on this side of the looking glass, we are not objetos. We are gente.”

 

 

When they take the psychoanalytic terms “transference” and “interpretation” onto a South African farm or onto US college campuses, Mark Solms and Jyoti Rao also are also walking us through a “linguistic portal.” In Student Activism as Interpretation Rao explains how the work of social justice activists functions like psychotherapy when activists are “imploring us to attend to our collapsed and curtailed capacity for love.” She connects the attributes of psychoanalytic interpretation: introjection, catharsis, insight, identification, and working through to social justice activism in universities. Channeling Freud’s 1915 monograph Why War, Rao reminds us that “We must find a way to differentiate ourselves from the compelling calls of the past … and be able to bear standing too close to the great changes ….”

 

 

Freud recognized that underlying our ability to “work through” present difficulties is the flypaper of history, the thing to which everything sticks. Mark Solms’s In My Backyard describes the very sticky, conflictual, and painful process of working out what to do with the land he inherited from his colonial ancestors. “In psychoanalysis, the taking of history is the treatment,” he writes. “Much like the analysis of transference, it wasn’t an intellectual exercise of learning about Oh so once upon a time there were settlers who stole the land, and once upon a time there were settlers who brought slaves here. It was lived.”  

 

 

Historical facts and present experiences, like the bass and treble notes in a minor or major chord, play simultaneously in analysis. But when the past is whitewashed out of existence as Grose describes in Kennedy’s Death and American Fascism or when historical traumas harden into weaponry as Hennes describes in We Say “Never Forget,” the music grinds to a halt. Step by step, Grose shows us how “the darkness of November 22, 1963, speaks to the darkness of our moment.” In example after example, Hennes shows how the mantra of “never forget” leaves us “clinging to the inhumanity and guilt of the perpetrators, even as we cling to the humanity and innocence of the victims.” Grose and Hennes remind us in different ways that Solms’s “taking of history,” the music of psychoanalysis, is not to be taken for granted.

 

 

For Solms and Rao, the sea change required to move the world starts from within: from within the analyst, from within the social activist. It requires having the inner strength to hold on to hope in the face of anguish. Solms describes how he found this inner strength by relying on his psychoanalytical experience and knowledge. He realized “this was bad; this was a horrible situation, and [he] just needed to . . . sit with it and let it be the ugly thing that it is, until [he] started to see the nature of it . . .”

 

Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin are also using their analytic capacities to forge hope where speech has been absent. This issue marks the second series of their ongoing epistolary commitment to bear each other’s pain, to move each other’s hearts. Much as Freud reconfigured the “borders of Acheron,” the hell of being human, when, in The Interpretations of Dreams, he first spelled out the nature of our unconscious, Dajani and Rozmarin have embarked on a project that potentially will reconfigure the borders of psychoanalysis.

 

Drawing on their own histories, in Learning From All Things they have been talking and writing about how psychoanalysis is empowered to address our anguished world. The courage it has taken them “to stand” as Freud wrote, “too close to great change,” and to tolerate, as Solms has tolerated, “sitting with the ‘ugly thing that is’ until they are able to see the nature of it” has been heroic—harrowing and hopeful.  “We are getting close to where we need to be—an impasse of sorts where we need to figure out how to dig ourselves out.” Dajani writes to Rozmarin, “I understand your love for Israel, your belonging there, your deep protective impulse. I too love Palestine, belong there, and the impulse to protect courses through my veins.”  “My challenge,” Rozmarin writes back, “is to find a place to speak from, a place that is not either a complete turning away… or, if I hold to my association, a place of absolute, paralyzing guilt and shame.”

 

 

Describing how he was taught to live in fear and hate of his Indian neighbors when growing up in Pakistan, in The Price of Belonging, Arsalan Malik tells us how he managed to leave the fundamentalist, religious dictatorship that was his childhood home. “One of the most important endeavors in which human beings can engage in,” he believes, “is to rise above our belief systems and group ideologies to overcome injustice …and stand in solidarity with those who are terrorized, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or tribe.” Poignantly, he writes of loving the Pakistani people and culture and loving his adopted American home, while not fully feeling he belongs to either.

 

 

While some ROOM 6.24 authors describe the strength and courage it takes to not belong, Zimmerman’s and Steele’s essays describe the courage it takes to try to belong. “This is the essay my therapist doesn’t want me to write,” begins Zimmerman’s No More Passing. “I wish that I could say that I don’t understand her concerns, but I do… I’ve countered [her] that writing about my disability would be empowering, that it would give me a way to openly claim a part of myself that I’ve tended to keep at arm’s length.” In Mis/Fitting, Steele wonders if there is a space for her in the field of psychoanalysis itself. She loves psychoanalysis, and as a candidate in training she wants to belong. But will the couch collapse under her weight? Will she fit? Will she be judged here, too? Zimmerman and Steele are longing to belong, to be recognized and taken in for who they are.

 

 

We know, as Calvino could only imagine, what it is like to have work that lets us escape the limited perspective of our individual egos, work conceived from outside the self that allows us to enter into selves like our own, and find speech where there is no language. This, of course, is the work of psychoanalysis.

 

 

ROOM is a work of community psychoanalysis. Since its conception just days after the 2016 US election, the authors, artists, and poets who create each new issue have, over and over again, given speech to a space which has no language during times when, in Rao’s words, “Our feelings of helplessness are at the zenith.” Most recently, Alyona Esse-Chukanova, an analyst from Lviv, Ukraine, wrote an email and gave permission to share it: “Please use my post for your project! I really want us Ukrainians not to be forgotten. We are holding on with the last of our strength.”

 

 

Dear All!

I’m writing this post to the sound of sirens, for the third time today. Today I turned 52 years old. Today, I’m involuntarily thinking about my life story and thinking about the future. Do I have one? Does my son have a future? Will I live to see my grandchildren? Is it possible that everything will end this year? I see my colleagues trying to understand how psychoanalysis can help. Help with what? To stay alive? At least mentally to the end? What makes you, my dear colleagues, confident that psychoanalysis can help? Your experience? Your involvement? Your human solidarity with others? Your theories? Your clinical and personal experience? What is your hope, my dear? Please share it with me! 

 

Warmly,

Alyona Esse-Chukanova (Lviv, Ukraine)

 

 

Dear, dear Alyona,

Yes. Sharing our experience, our involvement, our human solidarity with others, our theories, our clinical and personal experience—sharing all of these things with each other is what gives us hope that we might stay alive, at least mentally, to the end.

Alyona, dear, ROOM 6.24 is for you.

Warmly,

ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action