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.

Kennedy’s Death and American Fascism by Richard B. Grose

Essays

After my shock and rage subsided a bit, my first thought was that this act, the murder of an American president by members of the US government, has elements of a fascist coup about it. The men who planned the murder obviously had contempt for the Constitution and the electoral process by which Kennedy had become president. We know from public statements of the CIA planners that they were right-wing “hardliners,” who regarded the danger posed to the United States by the Soviet Union as apocalyptic and existential.

We Say “Never Forget” by Tom Hennes

Essays

I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service by rallying around the cry of Never Forget when that cry means we should never forget precisely those things that prevent us from knowing the traumas that others have experienced, perhaps even at our own hands—the ways that our good may have been their bad, or could become so, even without our knowledge or consent.

The Depolarization Project

Community Projects

The Depolarization Project is a group of four psychoanalysts and four people who are not in the mental health field yet are interested in the spread of toxic polarization within our society. Our group is quite diverse in terms of age, religion, and political leanings. We meet monthly to discuss readings, some of which focus on the process of toxic polarization itself, and others that have been polarizing within the field of psychoanalysis. Here group members talk about the impact of the Depolarization Project on themselves and why they continue to be involved.

Beginnings by Hattie Myers

Editorials

[…]From ROOM to room we never can predict how our community will fill this space, and we are often surprised. In the midst of the violent societal crisis unfolding in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, and with the pending election looming over the United States, it was striking, this time, that the submissions for ROOM 2.24 received were, for the most, quieter and more inwardly focused. The authors recall how the grip of class, gender, race, and geopolitical history held them so tightly that it was, at times, actually difficult for them to “look up and out.”

Crossing Divides by Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin

Correspondence

As kids, Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin grew up within hours of each other, one in Beirut, the other in Tel Aviv—to parents who were born in what had been Palestine/Israel. From an astute understanding of the unconscious process, they have written, separately, about belonging and unbelonging and about the interpolation of culture on our beings. Now they meet, for the first time, to write about the impact the current catastrophe in their homeland is having on their souls, about the trauma and resilience in their families’ histories, and about the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking today.

My Mother’s Haiti by Shari Appollon

Essays

[…] Ayiti engaged our senses from the moment we woke up to the second we fell asleep in the home my mother and father adored as first-time home buyers. I could not comprehend as a child, nor as an adolescent, why her words did not match her actions. Did she love her country? Undoubtedly. Then why the constant critiques and harshness? Why is it I never heard her utter a sentence of gratitude, warmth, or positivity toward the first land she called home unless recalling a small cluster of memories from her childhood? Perhaps my memory is foggy and I am only a recorder for what was shared with me.

Fascism Amnesia: A Failure of Witnessing by Jill Salberg

Essays

Disappeared memory and history erased remain fascism’s best weapon. In the world as it exists, the protofascist leader purports omnipotence, forcing helplessness and weakness into the minority group to be victimized. Which part of the split would any of us need to inhabit to stay sane in this kind of world? This simultaneous diffusing of victim/perpetrator processes into the collective rests upon a failure of witnessing, an aborted mourning process of the atrocities of prior generations.

A Sea of Mothers by Ann Augustine

Essays

[…] It may be that my security comes not simply from a “good enough” mother, as Winnicott theorizes, but from “good enough” mothering—a multitude of mothers who created a collage of mothering and a patchwork of sufficient “reliable holding” for me to draw on. I also wonder whether there is a different kind of security that grows in the gaps of not having a mother—that some of my security comes not in spite of, but perhaps because of, these early losses. As I look back, I know that in the free-falling, I grew a sense of being carried—not by any one person, but by life itself.

Book Review by Lava Schadde

Reviews

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s book Gender Without Identity (2023) brings into dialogue psychoanalysis with trans and queer, gender and sexuality (TQGS) studies. For someone like me, working mainly in philosophy and TQGS studies and fascinated by the differing (dis)avowal of identity in these fields, the title of the book sparked my interest—what might it mean, I wondered, for the question of gender identity to be raised instead at the intersection of TQGS studies and psychoanalysis?