Click cover to read or download ROOM 2.26 or previous issues
Wars, atrocities, and political upheavals shape our destiny. Ideologies and propaganda mold our views of what is real and what is true. My history also taught me that just as we cannot escape death, we may not be able to…
I attended a symposium featuring analysts and therapists who are living and working in Ukraine or Russia, as well as those who have fled from their homes in those countries. They have come together in virtual town halls to support…
NOPE: Neighbors Defending Democracy is an all-volunteer group based in Washington, DC. Canvassing for Democratic candidates in battleground states, they approach voters with a respectful curiosity that seems related to the stance the analyst takes in practice. Surprisingly often, this…
The van climbs ever higher. I marvel at the spare, rocky landscape and the vast distances on every side as we make our way, curving upward, sometimes perilously close to the edge. Above it all, the Big Sky takes my…
When Z. was away at a psychoanalytic conference in Rome, her patient D. came into her home office for his Tuesday-afternoon therapy appointment. He probably sat in her waiting room for a couple of minutes, then walked into her office…
Diane Raptosh teaches creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her eighth book, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2022. Her collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press)…
As Thrul suggests, the end of history thesis fits well with the rise of the biological deterministic model for understanding mental distress. The widespread adoption of this paradigm in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communities has much to do with the…
In issue 10.22, Mike Eigen offers a vignette that acts like a koan inviting the reader to depths beyond the obvious.
There is a “deep and somber unity” when the different impressions of our senses enter into “correspondence.” So writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his seminal book The Poetics of Space. It is this “correspondence” that allows us to receive…
…It has a space to lie down. Other than that, the room is bare. I am tempted to use the word “barren,” which I think captures a fear I cannot articulate. All I can feel is how afraid I am.…
I am sitting on the windowsill in my living room. It’s five in the morning of the 181st day of the war. The night was sleepless, sirens after sirens, when the valley with the river canyon amplifying the sounds give…
…I never walk in the city in order to make friends, although every encounter, for the most part, is a friendly one in the city. I am an old woman now, and the city has been ravaged even more than…
Grace Bakst Wapner’s work with urethane or satin, clay or bronze, chiffon or pipe cleaners in an interactive dialogue between material and object has been determinative in her process. In the early 1970s she erected walls and barriers constructed from satin…
It begins when any one of us living abroad confirms dates for a visit. My mother starts asking weeks in advance for our favorite foods so that she can core, stuff, mince, chop, and knead her way into neatly packed…
Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published four books—Such Stuff as Dreams, A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Bone Shop of the Heart—and numerous articles on…
What is, or was, the End of History? The political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the victory of the “Western world” in the Cold War and ended, definitively, the struggle between…
Terri Greco’s poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, Jacar Press, and Main Street Rag. She was the recipient of a James Applewhite Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention, 2020) and an honorable mention…
…The work on transgenerational transmission and healing of trauma has been focused on familial ties and attachment experiences. In the case of gay men, the generations are linked through an identity that isn’t familial. Thirty years beyond the worst of…
Mr. Stevens, an elderly man who stands a head shorter than me, is helping me to cross the street. “It’s safer to cross here,” he says, placing his hand gently on my elbow. “You have to be careful when there’s…
