Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform by Stefania Baresic

Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform by Stefania Baresic

Essays

I understand my subliminal acknowledgment of this absence as the source of my uncontainable sadness when I look at his image. I recognize the seed of that absence in my younger self as well, when in the grip of my defenses I distanced myself from an other with all my disowned shame around my own vulnerability; in the way I was a mother to my child, when unaware of my own dissociated self-states, I shared with them the heavy anxiety of my emotional inheritance.

The Shiftless Countryside of Emancipation, 2024

Kara Walker

Art

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, and raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award in 1997, and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work can be found in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), Rome; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

Essays

The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.

Bare Life by Shifa Haq

Bare Life by Shifa Haq

Essays

[…] In my dream, a vampirish presence is approaching fast to feed on me. It dawns on me that this is an unconscious representation of those for whom my heart bleeds. On waking up, shame replaces terror. Besides one’s identification and caritas, is it possible I have perpetuated a private caste division in which I must protect myself against the ones condemned to starve?

Degrees of Separation by Katie Burner

Degrees of Separation by Katie Burner

Essays

Reflecting on the moment, this wasn’t simply the first time I was more honest with a client; it was the first time I was more honest with myself. These thoughts had been brewing for some time, but I had never spoken them aloud before. My dissent left me feeling uneasy and enlivened—uneasy because I feared abandoning my faith’s admonition to not be “of the world,” and enlivened because I was stepping into a truer version of myself…. this faith journey burdens my mind with more existential aches and pains than I care for; but if anything is worth the struggle for me, it’s the task of exploring where meaning and purpose reside.

No More Passing by Lisa Zimmerman

Essays

While I have been impacted by my physical limitations, the bigger burden has always been my self-consciousness. No matter how much success I achieved, I could never shake the feeling that I was defective and that my defect eclipsed all else. At the same time, though, the steady stream of reassurances I’ve received to the contrary made these fears feel a bit like paranoia. There was something relieving in thinking that it was all in my head: if it was simply a matter of low self-esteem, there was a fix for that.

Sabian Symbols

Mis/Fitting by Jamie Steele

Essays

I could not stop dwelling on that first question: Can it hold me? Will I fit? My Goldilocks search for an analytic training program, and more specifically for a training analyst, has been a long one, spanning three institutes and nearly a decade. This question of fit and containment has been at the crux of that search. I became a therapist in the first place because of my life-changing encounter with psychoanalytic theory while I was on another path. Yet my experiences with training and with the analytic community have consistently been of myself as a person at odds with the field.