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?

Rights of Passage by Isaac Slone

Essays

In the elementary school common room, boys congregated in one area, and girls congregated in another. I stood in the middle, grappling with a painful sense of disconnection. Folding in with either group was impossible. I was alone in noticing the binary division.

Second Chances by Delia Kostner

Essays

[…]At the clinic, I became part of a lively swirl of women who provided me with the guidance and intimacy I lacked at home. They were my family as my family became increasingly unavailable. Women ran the show. It was a heady time. It was 1974, the Roe v. Wade decision just made abortion legal, and an earlier state law gave teenagers free access to reproductive health services. There was enough funding to never turn anyone away for lack of money.

Backstory by Aaron Bourne

Essays

I sit across from the Washington elite. I work to access their thoughts and dreams as they evolve in the therapeutic relationship. It can look like a one-sided process, but it most certainly is not. When it goes well, my clients pour their pain into the space I provide. Because this year marks two decades of continuous practice for me, I find myself reflecting on the deeper nature of these relationships. What is the stuff of therapy? Who am I to them? Who am I really in this space? I suppose these are standard twenty-year questions for any clinician.

From Hand to Hand by Hattie Myers

Editorials

[…] The essays in this issue were written months before the horrors which are now unfolding in the Middle East. As I write this editorial, I am aware that it may now be more difficult for some of ROOM’s readers to read Diana Moga, a Jew, and Abdel Azziz Al Bawab, a Palestinian, describing their experiences. “Dispossession is simply an ingredient of my identity,” writes Bawab in “A World Not Good Enough.” “And yet this identity, so saturated with pain, I came to realize is a nuisance to others.” For Diana Moga, “Psychoanalysis has been a way to hold on to conflicting world views, a way to make sense of (her) fragmented past and the pluralities of (her) identity.”

Beyond Reason by John Alderdice

Essays

For some years I have been warning publicly that we are heading into a third global conflict, and this, at times, led me to feel quite down about the prospects for humanity. This third global conflict is not simply a rerun of the disasters of the twentieth century, for before 1945, however terrible a war was and however many people died, the world would repair itself and in time the population of the world could be restored. With the threat of nuclear war and the reality of climate change, humankind has brought about the very real danger of our own demise.

Breaking Narratives by Diana E. Moga

Essays

I am writing to share my personal narrative and reaction to recent events at APsaA and in the Middle East. I am Jewish, and I lived in Israel from the time I was five, when we immigrated to Israel from Romania in the midst of the Lebanon War, to the time I was fourteen, when we left as the sirens wailed during the Gulf War. I watched Holocaust documentaries every year on Remembrance Day from the time I was eight years old.

Dragging Psychoanalysis by Eric Shorey

Essays

[…] I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that the field of psychoanalysis remains guilty for its historically hideous treatment of LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming individuals—a history which this event is trying to reconcile with. It’s no secret that until frighteningly recently, homosexuality and transgender identity were thought of as mental disorders, and the psychoanalytic “debate” about the pathological nature of non-heterosexual identity remains frighteningly echoed alive today.

A World Not Good Enough by Abdel Aziz Al Bawab

Essays

The demand for Palestinian erasure arises from a larger socio-historical structure, present mentally as a blueprint that maps out people’s presupposed positions in the world. Positions imposed historically through violence and valued differentially according to colonial logics. This map is unconsciously pulled upon to be reproduced externally, in an injurious gesture echoing the original colonial trauma that birthed the world attempting to be reproduced.

A Sovereign Nation by William F. Cornell

Essays

It had been a morning of running errands, and I was driving home to make lunch. I live on a major thoroughfare in the heart of Pittsburgh, adjoining the neighborhood of Garfield, a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood. As I turned the corner, I found the street blocked by police motorcycles and patrol cars. I was ordered to turn around. I parked nearby and then returned on foot to my street, again to be stopped by a patrol officer, who demanded to know where I was going. When I pointed to my house, he asked for my ID and then told me to go ahead to my house but “No farther; we are in the midst of an active shooter situation.” The neighborhood was in lockdown.

A Lack of Interest by Elle Wynn

Essays

The obsessions I look into the least in session are those centered around true crime. Call it countertransference; call it a lack of professional curiosity. Label it what you will, but what remains is an utter absence of interest in the very stories that keep many of my clients perched on the edge of their seats, breathless as they recount a tale that has captured their full attention that week.

Pages in the Park by Josephine Wright

Essays

[…]I had been photographing rain within the hearts and throats of flowers when I saw the pages on the wet bench that overlooked the West Side Highway and beyond to the racing waters of the Hudson. Looking more closely, I recognized the pages as the play Antigone. The two pages on top, 206 and 229, upside down from each other, were not consecutive. Had the reader taken the chunk of the book containing missing pages 207–228 because they had particular significance? Or was the intent to highlight these two remaining pages in the hope that a passerby would pause to read them. To alert them—me?…

Building Connection and Resilience by Carole Geithner

Essays

I have been honored to be a group facilitator in the Writing for Friendship program serving young women from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and fourteen other nationalities represented among the students attending the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. […] We breathe in the relative calm of our collective pause, and we share moments of beauty or experiences of kindness we observed over the previous week. And then I invite them to write, to give words to their strengths, their stories, their dreams.

Midnight Mission by Robert Frey

Essays

We’d have looked a motley crew, if it hadn’t been so dark. Five of us were on a midnight mission, a small band in dark clothing, struggling up a black hillside a few miles outside Rifle, Colorado. For every dusty yard gained, we slid back a step or two, trudging past broken boulders and scattered sagebrush in our climb up the mountain. No flashlights, since we were planning a criminal act. We tried to be quiet in case there was a guard. The nearest ranchers were in bed, miles away.

Reflections on Plowshares Eight by Dean Hammer

Essays

[…] With household hammers, we disarmed two nose cones for the Mark 12A warheads built by the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, PA. The sound of hammers disarming mass-killing weapons echoes in my mind, heart, and soul, evoking memories of that day at GE and the succession of Plowshare actions in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The reflective process forty years later offers a new understanding of this lived experience, personally and as an act of resistance to genocidal weapons.

Collectively Remembering Coline Covington by Janet Fisher

Essays

Five members of ROOM’s editorial board decided to read and discuss Coline Covington’s latest book, Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial, the third of a series of writings that interweave psychoanalytic ideas with political, social, and group theories, to arrive at the possibility of a moral world. This was not intended to be her final writing on the topic, only to lay out some of the theoretical problems involved in thinking about acts of destruction and possible paths to repair and reconciliation. In her last weeks of life, Coline learned of our plan to honor rather than just review her book, for which she was touched and thankful.

Reader Response: Shegofa Shahbaz

Responses

I am writing this email to tell you about our meeting yesterday with IPA subcommittee at the U.N. We talked about women’s situation in Afghanistan and they talked about my writing which is published in ROOM 6.23. They mentioned that my writing in ROOM 6.23 helped them. They also said that they will have programs for women in Afghanistan and we will work together on that….

Reader Response: Martha Bragin

Responses

Early on February 10, 2002, I sat in a large, crowded room in Kabul, Afghanistan. With coats pulled tight against the icy blasts from broken windows, representatives of the Afghan Interim Authority’s Ministry of Education prepared a plan to open Afghanistan’s schools at the traditional start time, Nowruz, the New Year….

Reader Response: Arnold Richards

Responses

This communication is a response to the two articles published in ROOM 6.23 about the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in Israel and on the West Bank: Naftally Israeli’s essay “From Erasure to Exclusion” and Richard Grose’s book review of Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s book, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine….