Letters Archives | Page 2 of 4 | ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

Letter from Krakow by Bartosz Puk

LettersBy admin July, 2020

It’s so good to be able to communicate with you on the current difficulties and all the matters concerned with COVID-19. I have been working in my consulting room in Kraków, Poland, for the last week and plan to continue with my patients by telephone or online. I do my best to consider this an opportunity to become closer to my patients. I think we both come into contact with something through the “contact barrier” or thanks to the contact barrier and the virus.

Letter from Istanbul by Ümit Eren Yurtsever

LettersBy admin July, 2020

During the past five days of analysis, I can say that the patients have lost the line between fantasy and reality. They no longer can tell the difference. They have lost the concept of interior and exterior. They say they are living in a home..

Letter from Bethesda by Marc Nemiroff

LettersBy admin July, 2020

The pandemic is terrifying, and I often dissociate intentionally from the danger. It is exhausting to be constantly, unchangingly aware that there is an enemy out there; it is really there. It is invisible. It could kill me and the people I love. Some days, I am on Zoom until my eyes can’t see and my head feels caught between two cymbals, like in an old…

Letter from Fontainebleau by Gianpiero Petriglieri

LettersBy admin July, 2020

I spoke to an old therapist friend and finally understand why everyone’s so exhausted after video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies…

Letters from Milán, Kassel, London and Warsaw

LettersBy admin July, 2020

Dear friends, dear all. I’m from Milan. I’ve been living in isolation since the end of February. Now, it’s almost a month. I’m seeing patients through Skype—all of them, including the one previously on the couch. No direct contact. They pay through the internet as well. Patients are now tired. Some of them are afraid to lose their jobs. Some have already lost them. They do not see the end of this nightmare. Children stopped going to school…

Letter from Paris by Bernard Chervet

LettersBy admin July, 2020

Paris is empty, very empty. Very strange. But it is even possible to feel a beauty in this emptiness! I have never seen Paris this way and in this state. Since Tuesday, we have lived in a complete confinement, “lockdown.” We have to stay inside our houses, without permission to go out. We need a certificate to go out and buy our food.

Letter from Moscow by Irina Sizikova

LettersBy admin July, 2020

I am a psychoanalyst from Moscow. Moscow has become empty. I’ve never seen Moscow in this condition. We now live in uncertainty and isolation. I do not have experience with remote analysis. As of this week, I have needed to reorganize my entire working schedule…

Letters from Cape Town and San Francisco by Ronald Davies and Alice Lowe Shaw

LettersBy admin July, 2020

I work privately and in our public health system—where most of our patients come from severely impoverished backgrounds—where therapy can be framed as being psychoanalytically informed.

Letter from Philadelphia by Harvey Schwartz

LettersBy admin July, 2020

I’m noticing that my relationship to the experience of self-disclosure is being affected by this health crisis we are all in the midst of…

Letters from Rio de Janeiro and Basel by Laura Ferreira and Joachim Küchenhoff

LettersBy admin July, 2020

Thanks for this space! I hope you’re doing well with all the restrictions. I have two thoughts: First, we are dealing with the fear of death, this fear of annihilation, which is experienced differently for each of us and must be especially mobilizing for those who are in the high-risk group. Generally, for the older generation…