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Room never knows where the next submission will come from. With every essay, poem, photograph, image of art, piece of music, or description of activism…
When our yoga teacher first taught us to visualize the space between two joints in our body and then to breathe into that space to open it up, we followed her instructions avidly…
I’m in a dissociated state. Other people might say I’m numb, robotic, going through the motions, “not all there.” But I’m a psychotherapist, so I recognize this sense…
The news about Venezuela is as alarming as it is strange. Each day brings a new mix of tragedy and absurdity. Venezuela is no longer a country…
A girl scavenges for food in the streets of Caracas. From 2014 to 2017, a visual essay about the starvation crisis in Venezuela by the photojournalist Federico Parra.
I got on an M train, thinking it was an F train, I wasn’t paying attention, and rode it out to Williamsburg by mistake. I looked up from the story I was reading about two mathematicians, one of them losing…
Dreams, words, ideas, memories, contradictions—all of it is wrapped together in your feelings. The moment of leaving nears. The departure is certain…
Trump. I am discombobulated because of Trump. I binge watch TV – not Fox, MSNBC. He has infected everything: my dreams, my conscious, my unconscious, dinners with my family, my work.
As I thought about the horror of separating young children from their families at the U.S. border, what came to mind was the London bombings during World War II…
A young woman from Namwon known for her virtue captured the unwanted attention of the newly installed magistrate who was arrogant, cruel, and narcissistic…
Sylvia Flescher is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her paper “Googling for Ghosts” grew out of her long-standing participation in New Directions and was published in the Psychoanalytic Review. In it, she describes the powerful effect…
Mariño’s work evokes the privation and moans of those who suffer a deep crisis similar to the post-war artistic expressions…
Leah Lipton, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and collage artist in New York City. She is a supervisor at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) and a faculty member at ICP and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center (PPSC).
Anniversaries exist as a demand to remember and, as such, they have a great deal in common with the work of psychoanalysis. Looking back from the vantage of ROOM’s first anniversary, it is amazing to recall that ROOM might not…
When I was asked to write a piece for this newsletter on the subject of play, work/life balance or the analyst at play, I began gathering materials as I usually do in my writing process, and then I wait and…
Sara Mansfield Taber is the author of Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, as well as essays, social commentary, and literary journalism. A psychologist and social worker, she has taught creative nonfiction writing…
At first, their silence made me wonder if I had overreacted to the presence of toy guns at the church event due to my experience with gun violence. My husband, Jamie Bishop, was murdered during the Virginia Tech massacre on…
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010) won the Juniper Prize and was published in 2010. Her fourth…
