Feeding by Roa Harb

Essays

It begins when any one of us living abroad confirms dates for a visit. My mother starts asking weeks in advance for our favorite foods so that she can core, stuff, mince, chop, and knead her way into neatly packed pans, ready to be thrown into the oven at a moment’s notice. On too many occasions, I’ve objected to this cheerful affirmation of the assumption that as expats we must be living in a state of food deprivation, possibly surviving on caloric stores between one visit and the next—to no avail. But it turns out that my younger sisters do have their favorite foods. It also turns out that I’ve had them—vociferously—in the mid-2000s.

Psychoanalysis at the End of the End of History by Sebastian Thrul

Essays

What is, or was, the End of History? The political scientist Francis Fukuyama claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the victory of the “Western world” in the Cold War and ended, definitively, the struggle between competing ideological grand narratives. Fukuyama’s theory asserted that the basic formula of human government had been settled once and for all in favor of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

Ghosts in the Bathhouse by Kevin Barrett

Essays

…The work on transgenerational transmission and healing of trauma has been focused on familial ties and attachment experiences. In the case of gay men, the generations are linked through an identity that isn’t familial. Thirty years beyond the worst of the AIDS epidemic, gay men who did not directly experience those years are still haunted by the history. In these cases, we aren’t able to speculate about transmission through attachment experience, so how do we think about the way this trauma has been transmitted to and worked through by subsequent generations?

Will You Go to the Bank with Me? by Jiameng Xu

Essays

Mr. Stevens, an elderly man who stands a head shorter than me, is helping me to cross the street. “It’s safer to cross here,” he says, placing his hand gently on my elbow. “You have to be careful when there’s construction.” I follow his lead as he steers us across an empty portion of the street just before it turns into a busy intersection, a visual confusion of traffic cones, temporary road markings, and piles of tarmac and gravel. I do not look left or right for oncoming traffic, my body implicitly trusting his judgment, his hand a reassuring pressure upon my arm.

The Comfort of Fake News by Isaac Tylim

Essays

The following vignette attempts to illustrate how the culture of fake news seemed to have invaded the sanctity of the therapeutic setting. One may argue that the underlying motivations for this invasion are multi-determined. No single interpretation could embrace what at first glance may be viewed as an acting out or an enactment. The case of E highlights the indestructibility of wishes underlying fake news, coupled with the permeability of the therapeutic frame.

Touching Psychic Fibers by Michael Eigen

Essays

The following is an excerpt from a session with a man who had been hospitalized several times and found his way into therapy. We have been working for five years in ways that have begun to touch places that were inaccessible or, rather, accessible mainly as threats that would periodically flood him.

Breaking Through by Hattie Myers

Editorials

“Nowadays, I am acutely aware of the power of transgenerational trauma that has come to life in new circumstances. I feel like it’s getting scary to speak openly. This is what was passed down to me from my ancestors from the USSR, what the people already lived during the oppressive Stalin years.”

Finding a Voice by Elena Ozerova

Essays

[…] It was clear that he had the ideal picture of our country in his head. The country he dreams of being a part of is kind and noble, driven by justice and dignity, where people live in peace and travel the world. Tears welled up in my eyes. Feelings were raging inside me. I love my son very much and I love my country, but to my regret, this ideal country has never existed. On the contrary, the worst oppressive practices of the Soviet Union started to mutate in an ugly way in nowadays Russia.

The Afghanistan Feeling by Daniela Andronache

Essays

[…] Afghanistan moves something inside me, a feeling, a motion, a disturbing sensation. Afghanistan is more than a place under a killing sun. It is a feeling from deep inside me. On the surface, it may comprise various geographical references: countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or Saharan Africa. We are so far apart, so alien to one another, and yet, thinking of those places, I feel as if a strong and old experience of them hides somewhere deep inside my body.