Webster reminds us that breathing phenomena were and are involved in a variety of neurotic symptoms and refers to the first patients of psychoanalysis, who developed swallowing difficulties, feelings of suffocation, and coughing tics. Nowadays, we experience the importance of breathing in anxiety disorders, with their high prevalence, and in a heightened form in panic attacks, in which the ability to breathe seems to be lost.
Survival Story: An Artistic Approach to Harm Reduction was inspired by my hands-on experience in harm reduction across both states. A pivotal moment occurred as I sat in a mobile phlebotomy van, under the dim glow of a headlamp, preparing to do a blood draw on a participant in the HIV/hepatitis C treatment program with which I work. Her reluctance to seek treatment at local hospitals due to fear of judgment and trauma underscored a common narrative of stigma experienced by people who use drugs.
So, in existential panic, I pulled my gaze from the claustrophobic weight and scanned the narrow tube I sat in and knew while I was not suffocating, nor in peril like those doomed cavers, I too lived in a dangerous world, and I too didn’t measure the consequences of my choices adequately, and I too got sticky in the ungainly spaces I crawled through.
Her grandmother warned her not to fall into the trap. She didn’t say what it looked like, or when or how one might typically encounter it. She used the article “the,” not “a,” as if there was only one trap to fall into, and everyone must look out for it at all times.
Did everyone in Honolulu know about the man on the balcony? Did the lead vocalist mean him? Was he famous, even? A local phenomenon? A freak, showpiece? Or were there many people in Honolulu missing chunks of themselves?
Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.
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.
With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.
[…] The interesting thing about dementia is that there are those moments of clarity, where the afflicted person comes to life with all the vitality of the past. It is so short, like the blink of an eye.
[…] Many of us recognized the need to unblinkingly face the people we kill by our complicity in a racist system, a system that could make such an unabashed murder possible. Many of us started a long-overdue process of mourning the devastating impact of our complicity, of the ways we enact our own nightmares, creating a nightmare for an Other. But such tectonic cultural shifts generate great volatility.