Overwhelm

“On the destruction of Carthage I can say nothing
because to say anything would be to say too little..”

— attributed to Cato by Montaigne, who, as it turned out, never said this at all

ROOM is a sketchbook for analytic action, and toward this end, my editorials have paralleled the action of psychoanalytic interpretation by recognizing common threads and highlighting the underlying themes that connect different voices from all over the world. In this way, the significance of each issue is brought to the surface and marks another discrete moment in ROOM’s living analytic archive.

The essays in ROOM 10.25 are as raw and urgent as any we have received. Their authors hail from Sudan, Palestine, Israel, Croatia, and the US. They write about what it feels like to be living a split screen. They write about how we split words from context. They write from inside a refugee camp in Gaza and from inside the federal building in New York. They write about children—their own and ours. There is no single thread to hang on to. There is no center that holds.

There are times in our work as analysts when silence is called for, when to say anything is to say too much. Finding strength to bear witness and to bear our broken hearts is also analytic action.