Reader Response: Scott Baum
In issue 10.22, Mike Eigen offers a vignette that acts like a koan inviting the reader to depths beyond the obvious.
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Social Dreaming by Hattie Myers
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…
My Back-Alley Abortion by Adrienne Harris
…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.…
August 23, 2022: Kamianets-Podilskyi by Svitlana Matviyenko
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…
August 27, 2021: Philadelphia by Elaine Zickler
…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
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…
Feeding by Roa Harb
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…
RATATOUILLE: Sonnet for Shelly Bach by Eugene Mahon
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…
Psychoanalysis at the End of the End of History by Sebastian Thrul
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…
Fire by Terri Greco
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…
Ghosts in the Bathhouse by Kevin Barrett
…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…
Will You Go to the Bank with Me? by Jiameng Xu
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…
The Comfort of Fake News by Isaac Tylim
The following vignette attempts to illustrate how the culture of fake news seemed to have invaded the sanctity of the therapeutic setting. One may argue that the underlying motivations for this invasion are multi-determined. No single interpretation could embrace what…
Touching Psychic Fibers by Michael Eigen
The following is an excerpt from a session with a man who had been hospitalized several times and found his way into therapy. We have been working for five years in ways that have begun to touch places that were…
Skiffieworlds by Joanne Brooks
Joanne Brooks is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and head of professional practice for the British Psychoanalytic Council. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she has an independent practice, she is a training therapist…
Breaking Through by Hattie Myers
“Nowadays, I am acutely aware of the power of transgenerational trauma that has come to life in new circumstances. I feel like it’s getting scary to speak openly. This is what was passed down to me from my ancestors from…
Finding a Voice by Elena Ozerova
[…] It was clear that he had the ideal picture of our country in his head. The country he dreams of being a part of is kind and noble, driven by justice and dignity, where people live in peace and…
The Talking Cure by Nancy Kuhl
Nancy Kuhl’s fourth book of poetry, On Hysteria, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books in 2022. She was a research fellow at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis from 2010 to 2019. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small…
