The Accidental Activist by Nancy Prendergast

The Accidental Activist by Nancy Prendergast

Essays

I grew up in the blue state of Rhode Island, where my father was active in local Democratic politics. I voted mostly for Democrats but registered as an Independent. While I never missed voting in a presidential election, I didn’t keep up with local or state politics. I simply had no time. I hoped our Sherwood Forest friends would come to their senses when they saw how woefully unprepared Trump was to govern. … But no matter what outrageous action Trump and the Republicans took, our friends reacted positively. When they realized we didn’t share their enthusiasm, they stopped talking politics with us. In the fall of 2018, I snapped.

These Words by Hattie Myers

Editorials

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.

In My Backyard by Mark Solms

Essays

Since going through the process on my farm using those psychoanalytical tools, I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa, and it’s a little different from other places. […]

Student Activism as Interpretation by Jyoti M. Rao

Essays

Intensely negative perceptions of the student activists have emerged, reflecting a type of transference I have termed the negative social transference, directed toward marginalized groups (student activists) from the dominant social surround (campus administrators, monied interests, and government power). Working through occurs first within activists and activist groups, who undertake internal psychological work as a precursor to their outer action. In order to undertake their activism, student activists must distinguish themselves internally from these negative transferences, which issue compelling calls from the past and its pre-patterned repetitions. Such a process of interior differentiation within activists sets the stage for the activism that will then create change in the outer world.

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.

The Price of Belonging by Arsalan Malik

Essays

For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis, were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent toward humanity, united under one God.

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.

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.