Spiraling Home

“This new terror attacks the glue of secondary process: the continuity of structures built over time, the meaningfulness of words, and the kind of inner balance which is essential to fully comprehend what another person sees and feels.”

——From our first editorial in ROOM 2.17

While analytic work can be sparked by a single event, the process is never linear —it spirals forward. The catalyst that sparked ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action was the 2016 US presidential election. We know from our clinical work that destabilizing moments can be uninvited entry points to long-standing unaddressed and unarticulated issues. It was Trump’s ascension to the US presidency that marked the explosion of fantasies that democracy and psychoanalysis could survive apart from history. ROOM was an analytic response to this explosion. From the beginning our mission has been to illuminate how our sociopolitical environment shapes our inner life, and how psychic reality impacts the world and what we are able to see of it. ROOM 2.17, our first issue that launched days after Trump’s first inauguration,  clocked a moment of utter shock, terror, and disbelief. Today, as we begin our tenth year, the striking insights, poignant reflections, and spreading community actions contained in ROOM 2.26 bear witness to our powerful conviction to the work at hand. 

The authors, activists, and analysts in this issue hail from India, the US, China, Japan, Myanmar, and the UK. Not coincidentally, they are engaged in a deeply creative and moral struggle that shows how the future of psychoanalysis and democracy relies upon our ability to let go of the false structures that we live in and that live in us. They describe the dislocated experience of losing both internal and external homes. They are unafraid to confront the myriad forms of violence that are blackening our worlds. Significantly, they write with hope about what might yet emerge when lineages once held apart by identity formations and theories of mind come face to face. They are lighting a non-linear path, and with them, ROOM is spiraling forward.  

Starting out, we wanted to create room to write what we had only dared begin to think, to generate new connections and build community. We wanted to bring the margins of our fields and countries into the center, expand our borders to include multiplicities of experience, and find a way to believe real change was possible. Never did we imagine that what we wanted would resonate with what so many others wanted. Today, ROOM’s ecosystem of biweekly podcasts, international roundtables, books, videos, and action/research groups has become a worldwide platform. The magazine has been read in over 160 countries and downloaded over 100,000 times. Over the last almost ten years, we have published over 400 contributors from six continents.

 ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action was a community-driven response to a world teetering on the edge of total madness and existential crisis. Protecting the space we need to keep thinking, to keep generating new connections, and to continue building community is ROOM’s analytic action. It’s where we began, and it remains our hope for the future.