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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…
Naomi Janowitz is a graduate of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. She teaches Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her most recent book is…
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…
Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey, where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Brickplight, the Willow Literary Magazine, Fearsome Critters, Susan, the Broke…
“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…
D. Dina Friedman has published widely in literary journals and received two Pushcart Prize nominations for poetry and fiction. She is the author of one book of poetry, Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press), and two young adult novels,…
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.…
The news photos—the bulky container ship straddled across the straight blue gash cut through yellow sands—prompted memories of my wonder and curiosity when, as an eight-year-old in June 1956, I gazed down from the deck of the P&O liner Strathaird…
I stood in front of the granadillas for what felt like an eternity, holding an empty plastic bag in my right hand and a shopping basket in my left. (A granadilla is a small South American fruit, with a round…
Jacqueline Shatz’s work has been included in exhibitions at the June Kelly, Monique Knowlton, and Kouros galleries in New York City, and she has curated and organized many exhibitions, including CollageLogic which was last presented in 2012 at Hampden Gallery…
Anton: The concept of loss or losing is important because it speaks to the ways that opening oneself up and allowing oneself to be moved is not just a benign thing to do; it involves relaxing one’s grasp of what…
All I can do is assert—with more passion than proof— a psychoanalytic mode that is more lyric than rational, more metaphysical than scientific. It has long been commonplace in our profession to say that Freud always hoped psychoanalysis would find…
I am the white Jewish mother of Black sons. My older child was called “the N word” for the first time in Fire Island, New York, when he was three years old. The younger one was called “the N word”…
It is Tuesday at 4:00 pm, and it is time for Ben, a white man in his early thirties. He often refers to himself as “strange” for feeling out of step in not holding popular, mainstream views like most of…
“I was thinking to myself, I can’t wait to tell them. They’re going to be so excited!” Or maybe the patient didn’t say excited—maybe they used a different word. I can’t exactly remember because my mind got stuck on them/they’re.…
Many of us have had the experience of standing in front of the window of a hospital’s newborn nursery, a partition that simultaneously protects and allows visitors to gaze at the variety of human life displayed within. The tiny creatures,…
