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.

Why We Can’t Stop Our Children from Dying of Gun Violence by Irwin Kula

Essays

Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that ‘works’ for everyone—allowing us to maintain our identities, our professional roles, our political affiliations, our ways of life, while experiencing ourselves as caring, engaged people who are doing something about this terrible problem. Our ritualized response to school shootings, going back to the Columbine shooting more than twenty-five years ago, protects us from confronting the transformations required to address this tragedy.

We’ve Had a Problem by Patrick Cole

Essays

The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell on the past. Consequently, the tense of the phrase “we’ve had a problem”: the initial problem is over, now we focus on making a plan for repairing the damage and resuming the mission. It is no surprise that in the wider populace, the words were wrangled back into the present tense as a cry for help. To us civilians, an explosion that occurred a few seconds ago is a current problem, and so we treat ourselves to a few minutes of high panic.

here and not here by Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Essays

Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also denying those who have inhabited the region for centuries, especially the Bedouin of the Al-Naqab, their rights to the land. Only the former South African ambassador refused to have trees planted in his or his country’s name, saying that it replicated apartheid.

Fomenting Antisemitism by Timothy Snyder

Essays

I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism.

American Resistance: A Mayflower Meditation by Elizabeth Cutter Evert

Essays

It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would all just go away. I am used to being at least externally “okay,” even when many others are not. Whether rising above or cowering in fear, I lose my capacity to act from a grounded center.   

Red Scare at City College by Iris Fodor

Essays

Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling at the top of his lungs, “The red sea of Communism is spreading over us all!” as he grimaced and pointed below to the crowd of booing students. As one of the few girls in this crowd, I stood among them, appalled, but silent and terrified.

The Wallet by Douglas H. White

Essays

I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and anti-Semitism? Why did this early event cause so much anguish and trauma in me thirty-five years after it happened? Was it because all nuns represented a kind of goodness in my six-year-old mind, a goodness that was shattered in an instant?

Matt by Jay Wiggin

Essays

Matt was crazy, or that’s what some people said. Once, in the midst of a panicked and angry moment, he sat down right in the middle of Braddock Avenue and refused to move. Drivers honked in confusion and yelled out their windows for him to get the hell out of the road, but he wasn’t going anywhere and certainly not for them, no matter how angry or leering or even genuinely concerned they might have been… These things happened with Matt, sometimes. 

Bike Week by Tamara Martin Causey

Essays

For 27 years it has been a local tradition. It is our little Sturgis. The town becomes unrecognizable but in a way that feels like the “rebellious, no rules, party of the century is here to stay” feeling. … And year after year I didn’t notice the subtle changes. It wasn’t until this year that I felt the pivot point of a paradigm shift. The realization of what I was seeing struck me with such a force that I had to stand frozen in the middle of a sea of bodies and go inward to try to reclaim my composure, emotions, and balance. 

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

Why I Write by Thomas H. Ogden

Essays

For me, the art of being an analyst involves the art of writing—the two are inseparable, each opens the door to the other. Writing is like dreaming in that it is a medium in which I think and talk to myself in ways that I cannot do in any other form. Also, like dreaming, it keeps me alive in my work as a psychoanalyst, for I find that I have to be creating something of my own (to come more fully into being myself) as I am immersed in trying to help a patient engage in creating something unique of his or her own (in coming more fully into being).

Winter into Spring by Alexandra Woods

Essays

We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course? My friend says, “I may not live to see us regain the changes we fought for. It is humbling.” When the cold afternoon sun lights up the floors, we sweep up glinting sand in a desultory way. No need to have things perfectly clean.

Free Radicals by Max Beshers

Essays

I’m in my own process of trying to find my way through this. My earlier attempts at activism were hampered by how I related to my own identity, which went something like this: I’m here as a white person to reckon with the harms that white people have done, but if whiteness is bad, how could I possibly do anything good?

Solitude, Resignation, and Hope by Rina Lazar

Essays

We are safe until we are not. We are never free of the fate of others–our kids in particular. Doomscrolling on the sidelines is not a solution in the slightest. I also know fatalism is not acceptable. Apathy is worse, even lethal. Each is a “pathology of perpetration” that normalizes the physical and ecological but also the systematic and psychic violence that goes hand in hand with climate breakdown.