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Essays Photograph of a wave of black water

TOXIC DRIP by Charles Rizzuto

Think back, if you will, to the halcyon days of the Reagan regime, with the Great Communicator’s elaborate economic agenda he called “trickle-down economics.” The alleged benefits never trickled down to most of us, and we know now that the…

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Essays © Mafe Izaguirre Digital numbers in color red showing as a giant clock on east river counting down days left in president trump's term

STILL HERE by William W. Harris

Well, it has been a little over a year, and he’s still here. I have stopped binge-watching TV, but he is still infecting my life. How can I ignore the Greenland saga or tune out the furious tears in response…

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Essays Black hands in a prayer

SO I LISTEN by Abraham Velazquez, Jr.

I remember my first time being at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis) and participating in their writing program, The Lyrical Circle. It was held in the space where we would be sharing and creating art for years to come. We met…

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Essays Blurred photograph of a person from the back with a red sweater

ON EDGE by Michael A. Diamond

All of us work at the boundary. In fact, we work and live at multiple boundaries. We belong to numerous systems and relational networks. The idea of boundary is a metaphor for where and when we come into contact with…

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Essays Judson Window, Wikimedia

A WINDOW IN by Elizabeth C. Evert

As a magazine at the intersection of the psychological and the political, Room has published a number of articles that aim to explore the cultural divides in the US and beyond. In this vein, Jacob Smith has written a piece…

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Essays Singapore, Giant trees by the Bay Futuristic gardens of Singapore

HOPE, DESPAIR, AND UTOPIA by Isaac Tylim

The 9/11 terrorist attack punctured America’s innocence, inflicting massive trauma on people across the country. Almost without delay, psychoanalysts felt compelled to shed their mantle of neutrality to better assist survivors, first responders, and those who were vicariously affected by…

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Essays Gustave Moreau: Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) | Photo by Ed Uthman

A FAMILY ROMANCE by Jeri Isaacson

In mythology, in fairy tales, and in psychoanalysis, losing one’s sight often indicates that a disaster has occurred, an event so unbearable that it is no longer possible to look at it. Yet in the ongoing scourge that is the…

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Essays Illustration by Mafe Izaguirre

VAGINAL VERITAS by Jill Gentile

In a recent interview1, Adam Phillips ventured the hypothesis that psychoanalysis was invented to address the problem of misogyny. This was a bold and unusual statement, and though we’ve long been initiated into Phillips’s refreshing, even scandalous, takes on often…

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A LESBIAN LEANS IN by Ellen Marakowitz

At the 2019 Oscars, Period. End of Sentence won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The film, about fighting stigma against menstruation in rural India, marked the first time a film about menstruation made it to the Oscars stage.

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REVISITING A DREAM by Joan Golden-Alexis

Currently trauma is defined less in terms of the personal (the individual) and more in terms of the collective (the social-political) with its potentially insidious soul-destroying qualities. This is Maria Root’s concept of everyday or “insidious trauma.” Root here is…

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A MAN WHO HATES WOMEN by Raquel Berman

As a psychoanalyst practicing in Mexico City, I have been thinking, writing and researching for decades about the unfathomable phenomenon of feminicide. The cultural, sociological, political, and economic complexities that have contributed to the killing of women are, I believe,…

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