ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

What Is Underneath by Danielle Speakman

Danielle Speakman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, MA. She is a graduate of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her enduring interest is in Jungian depth psychology, and she seeks to hold a therapeutic space where existential and spiritual questions are welcome. She views writing as a form of activism, love, empathy, and attention—essential to all that she does. She believes each of us has a part to play in the particular cosmos of our time. In these moments of helplessness, uncertainty, and war, poetry has become her way of reaching toward others, almost like passing someone a love note. She has been especially deepened by her doctoral work interviewing street children in Lima, Peru, which has continued to connect her to Latin America. She also practices and teaches yoga, which she believes keeps her honest, rooted in her body, and resistant to the pull of abstractions.

THROW YOUR INHERITANCE AWAY by Mahsa Nourzadeh

Mahsa Nourzadeh (Mahsa Nouri) is an Iranian poet who writes in both Persian and English. She has not only found poetry a means to share her feelings and heal her wounds but also considers translation an adventurous and helpful path. She translates her thoughts and feelings into poetry, her poems into another language, sometimes into another art form, and finally into the feelings of the audience, using translation as a way to communicate. With each step along this path, she aims to shed new light on the depths of her own and the audience’s feelings, beginning the healing of unspoken pain. You can read her other works in Spellbinder magazine and Encyclopedia Prismatica.

ROOM 6.26 Poems

Dear Iphigenia by Sara Mansfield Taber

I know not what
A mother can say
To a daughter
Who was ripped from her
Before they’d barely begun
The long alliance usual to a mother and child

Poems

Roses began by Ann Shenfield

Ann Shenfield works across various media. Her animated films have received local and international prizes including selection to the Berlin film festival. Her poetry has received numerous awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her book A Treatment (Upswell Publishing) was listed in The Age Best Books 2023. She is a practicing psychoanalyst (Candidate) and member of the Australian Center for Psychoanalysis.