Most of the graduate students I teach are preparing to work in the Catholic Church. Many of them think, without question, that hope is always a good thing. This is understandable, given that they, like Christians from other denominations, believe…

Distance is nothing new for psychoanalysts. Except for all the unimaginable newness, of course. The profound losses to be reckoned with for the training—and frankly, the life—I had imagined having before the pandemic. But I have been distant before this.…

Looking out the window from my airplane seat, I anticipated seeing the familiar landmarks of the valley city below—Phoenix, Arizona—as they came into view during the flight’s descent.[…]But then there was a sudden change into the unfamiliar. The body—my body—has…

I live directly across the street from our neighborhood elementary school, and on 9/11 I sat on this school’s playground with my young children as they circled in a mix of playfulness and aimlessness. They knew something terrible was around[…]In…

Our Afghan friends are singing to us from far away, with a fearful trill. America promised our support and, at the end, abandoned them. It was sheer treachery. Yet I hope we might find ways to be true friends, that…

It’s been more than a year in semi-lockdown, and I have to push myself to leave the hole I’ve been working and sleeping out of—the hole that is my bedroom, a kind of symbol of my libido, somehow both empty…

Six faces stared through cyberspace as our writing workshop began. In all the groups I’ve led lately, as part of an initiative aimed at helping health care workers and first responders find their way through grief, some stories linger in…

[Nature] has her [sic] own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction…

In Susan Kassouf’s essay “A New Thing Under the Sun” (ROOM 6.21), she writes of her dismay in finding that there would be no mention of the more-than-human environment during her psychoanalytic training. I want to expand Kassouf’s premise about…

My awareness of the climate crisis started like tiny raindrops in a pond, splashes of recognition each time I read a news article about the catastrophic consequences of our warming world…

Early in the pandemic, I realized that what I needed was an instruction book that would tell me how to survive. I pictured it, a guide tailored to my personal needs, the first section titled How to be a Psychotherapist…

We talk about the blues as sadness and transcendence of sadness. As an American Black, my experience tells me that it certainly seems to be both of these things simultaneously—contradictory things existing together, something we psychoanalysts know about. To me…

As an article or essay that I am writing is nearing completion, I take the essential step of reading it aloud to myself. I have found that this practice helps me identify phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that feel awkward in…

An urgent sense of the possible contributed to my pursuit of psychoanalytic training over a decade ago, back when CO2 levels were still below 400 ppm. At the time, my analyst and my own analysis were introducing me to an…

“AWASSNI, AWASSNI.” The man screamed these words before letting out a guttural cry. Awassni is Arabic for “he shot me.” It had been some years since the war began, and most of us had learned to distinguish sound more keenly.…