A Bag of Broken Tiles: Report from Tehran by Darya Navidi

ROOM 6.26, Essays

If I was refusing the war, my patients were doing something no less striking. In the first week, nearly all of them spoke not of explosions, fear, or death but of boundaries in their relationships. Of partners who failed to understand them. Of things left unsaid, now expected to be intuitively known. The war remained almost entirely absent from the room. It appeared only in fragments—quick references, passing remarks—never staying long enough to be examined.

On This Land by Laura Farha

ROOM 6.26, Essays

My patient and I, both presently in the US, are originally from neighboring villages in south Lebanon. She, Shia from a predominately Shia village; I, Orthodox Christian from a mixed village. I can see her village from the veranda of my three-hundred-year-old ancestral home. It’s a view that I know and love well.

The White Paint from Mr. Darcy’s Shop by Charmaine McCaulay

ROOM 6.26, Essays

What I carried within me, the quiet measuring of worth, was part of something bigger, a system of internalized racism and lateral violence born from the dominance of whiteness. It is oppressive and heavy, a hierarchy that demands we look down even when we are being looked down upon. Mimicking the outside white world, I became judge and jury of worth, and I aimed that power at people of colour.

Good People by Jacqueline Morgan

ROOM 6.26, Essays

Most people are good. I wish I’d had these words handy when a woman yelled at me the day before Christmas because I couldn’t let her return her puzzle without a receipt. I called my manager over to handle it, stepping aside and allowing my eyes to glaze over as he authorized the return. The customer thanked my manager, saccharine-sweet. I refused to look at her until she was gone.

War and the Dreamworld by Ipek S. Burnett

ROOM 6.26, Essays

Death anxiety. These words were on my lips as I emerged from the dream. Was it a lay interpretation? An existential explanation offered by my returning consciousness? A consolation, like wiping the brow of a child at night, whispering, “It was just a nightmare”? An attempt to convince myself that the dream signaled a common, if repressed, fear?

The Shared Language of Unmaking by Kanika Mehrotra

Essays

Long before psychoanalytic language existed, voices from the Indian subcontinent sang of surrender in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Kabir, a fifteenth-century poet-saint, along with other Sufi-Bhakti mystics, moved through streets, riversides, and marketplaces, composing verses that challenged authority, hierarchy, and rigid forms of identity. Their practice was embodied in song, rhythm, and dance, moving toward freedom, encounter, and transformation and away from doctrinal certainty.

Between Worlds: A Chinese Analyst’s Journey by Xiaomeng Qiao

Essays

“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.

Overwriting Caste: From the Margins of the Mystic Writing Pad by Bia Roy

Essays

The complexity of the patient-analyst dyad increases when the two have different cultural backgrounds. I am an analyst-in-training who has worked and lived in many contexts, in Japan and the UK. In Japan, I have lived as a third-generation Zainichi Korean. Zainichi refers to Korean immigrants or their descendants (in Japanese, 在zai means “present” and 日nichi means “Japan”). Japan adopts jus sanguinis: Nationality and citizenship are determined by one’s parental heritage, not the country of birth (jus soli). In addition, one cannot hold dual citizenship. After Japan colonised Korea in 1910, Koreans were forced to become Japanese.

Being Zainichi by Atsumi Minamisawa

Essays

The complexity of the patient-analyst dyad increases when the two have different cultural backgrounds. I am an analyst-in-training who has worked and lived in many contexts, in Japan and the UK. In Japan, I have lived as a third-generation Zainichi Korean. Zainichi refers to Korean immigrants or their descendants (in Japanese, 在zai means “present” and 日nichi means “Japan”). Japan adopts jus sanguinis: Nationality and citizenship are determined by one’s parental heritage, not the country of birth (jus soli). In addition, one cannot hold dual citizenship. After Japan colonised Korea in 1910, Koreans were forced to become Japanese.

Victims of a Commodified Society by David Morgan

Essays

On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam, an off-duty police officer working in private security who served as a building guard and management employee. The gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, aged twenty-seven, ended his own life after the attack. Like so many similar incidents, this was not merely another chapter in the relentless American cycle of gun violence…It has now become, at least for this writer, a parable of what happens when people are reduced to functional market value and usage: a world where human beings come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as assets or failures, winners to be rewarded or discards to be forgotten.

The Silenced Voices by Naw Cheni Thein

Essays

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