The Writing on the Wall by Hattie Myers

Editorials

Each of the writers in ROOM 6.25 has captured, in their own way, something of this extraordinary moment we are all living through. This is not easy. In his essay Why I Write, Thomas Ogden explains why. “Part of the difficulty of writing well lies in the fact that writing any sort of analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction is autobiographical,”  Ogden writes; “I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark.” This unique issue of ROOM bears the mark of multitudes and holds the scars of generations.   

In the Midst by Hattie Myers

Editorials

The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times.

ROOM 10.24

Toward a New Collectivity by Hattie Myers

Editorials

In Kara Walker’s words, “history is the oft-repeated fable; power is the oft-repeated script.” From Walker’s art in THSLNWN: In the Colorless Light of Day, to Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin’s conversation in Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, ROOM 10.24 is a testament to our collective heartbreak and resilience. Exactly one week after the 2016 US election, we created ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We knew that to “live out,” in Sartre’s words, “that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid unvarnished way,” we needed to do it together. For the last eight years, ROOM’s worldwide community has engaged in a collective struggle for recognition and authenticity across generations, culture, and political pressure. Now, just one week after the re-election of Donald Trump, ROOM 10.24 could not be more prescient.

Do You See? by Richard B. Grose

Do You See? by Richard B. Grose

Essays

Seeing and being seen are also obviously essential to individuals. They form a part of the psychopathologies addressed in psychoanalytic treatments, ranging from a need to be invisible to a need always to be seen. Pointing out the similarities between national and individual realities puts us in mind of the tragedy of large groups.

Learning From All Things by Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin

Correspondence

Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin are using their analytic capacities to forge hope where speech has been absent. This issue marks the second series of their ongoing epistolary commitment to bear each other’s pain, to move each other’s hearts. […] Drawing on their own histories, they have been talking and writing about how psychoanalysis is empowered to address our anguished world.

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Letter from Jerusalem by Yehuda Fraenkel

Letters

The magnitude of emotional load together with ethical and clinical questions puts us in a total “terra incognita” state. I think that the need for coherence in external chaos is indeed universal, yet to us are both a demand and praxis of psychoanalytic practice engaging intrapsychic chaos.

Almond Tree Branches on Blue Sky

AFTERWARD by Ofra Bloch

Essays

There was no way I could have known when I went to Germany to interview the descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust for my film Afterward that this journey would take the form of a personal analysis. On the surface, I wanted to rid myself of my hatred for these Germans, who had done nothing wrong but whose ancestors tried to kill my people. I wanted to stop the cycle of hate
and othering before I passed it on to my own sons, to the next generation.

THE LONGEST DAY by Eugene Mahon

Poems

Eugene Mahon, MD, is training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published three books—A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Boneshop of the Heart—and numerous articles on psychoanalysis. He practices in New York City.

Photography by Karen Berntsen Elon, Israel 2016

MEMORIAL by Rachel Neve-Midbar

Poems

Rachel Neve-Midbar, MFA, is the author (under the name Heimowitz) of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Prairie Schooner, and Georgia Review. She was recently a finalist for the COR Richard Peterson Prize, winner of the Passenger Prize, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Rachel completed her MFA at Pacific University in 2015 and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California.