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Essays Photograph by Yitzi Katz

A BATHROOM WITHOUT A SEAT by Yitzi Katz

I work at an agency in a central city in Israel that focuses on treating children who are survivors and perpetrators of sexual violence. The office has one bathroom with two private toilet rooms: a toilet without a toilet seat…

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Essays Photo by Alisdare Hickson

WOOLF AT THE DOOR by Dana Sinopoli

I am sitting in my office, thinking about rooms. Writing for Room has prompted this state of reverie, during which one of my favorite works, A Room of One’s Own, passes through my mind. In her essay, Virginia Woolf writes…

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Essays Photo by Open Minder.

COMING TO THE WEST by Natasha Kurchanova

I had a safe childhood growing up in Brezhnev-era Soviet Russia. My family was a rather typical one, according to the principle formulated by Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in…

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Essays Photo by Neil Moralee and Gift Habeshaw (Collage)

A COLLEGE PHILOSOPHY LESSON by Brent Matheny

In the fall semester of 2016, PHIL 410 met on Wednesdays, in the Campbell-Meeker seminar room, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. It was my first upperclassman seminar, as well as my first course with Alexandra Bradner, who would later become…

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Essays Photography by James McNellis. March for Life, Washington, DC.

IN GOOD FAITH by Elizabeth Evert

Yes, there was a blue wave in November 2018, but many of the races were achingly close. Even factoring in the distortions of gerrymandering, the country is torn. As a liberal New York psychoanalyst who has spent time in Christian…

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Essays Photo by Alisdare Hickson

IMAGINING THE OTHER by Kerry Leddy Malawista

In all obvious ways, I am not an outsider. I am not isolated from the majority by dint of my sexual orientation, skin color, class, religion, disability, or appearance— all the notable and painful ways one can become marginalized.

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PLAYING FOR REAL by Eugene Mahon

Room’s definition of itself as a “sketchbook of psychoanalytic action” got me thinking: What is psychoanalytic action? Is it action informed by considerable analysis of all its components and determinants?

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Essays Photography by Jamal Jaheleen.

BURIED NECK DEEP by Lama Z. Khouri

Lately, a dream I had twelve years ago has been coming back to me. I dreamt that my four-year-old son (he’s sixteen now) was buried neck deep in the middle of a neighborhood and surrounded by modest houses…

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