It’s History by Kyrie Mason

All of us are regularly asked to engage with the past in some way. The world is saturated by history. But, then, a simple question: What is history? Ask fifty people and you’ll get, typically, fifty shades of the same answer: History is something about a past. Whether as myth or memory, narrative or science, or found in gradients in between each, the most common denominator is a starting place in an ambiguous past, a “before now,” which is given meaning only insofar as it is connected to other things either similarly before now or, sometimes even more strangely, to things happening “now” or “later.”

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(Re)Locating Analytic Space by Christina Nadler

Distance is nothing new for psychoanalysts. Except for all the unimaginable newness, of course. The profound losses to be reckoned with for the training—and frankly, the life—I had imagined having before the pandemic. But I have been distant before this. […] To be at a distance is to still be at, to still be located, not completely untethered. This has always been the analyst’s task.

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Circling by Loren Sobel

Looking out the window from my airplane seat, I anticipated seeing the familiar landmarks of the valley city below—Phoenix, Arizona—as they came into view during the flight’s descent.[…]But then there was a sudden change into the unfamiliar. The body—my body—has a way of communicating when it’s thrown from the familiar, dislodged from regular rhythms. I quickly felt disoriented. A second later, as my mind caught up to what my body already knew, I started to worry. The plane rolled.[…]In the (re)ascent, each individual’s seemingly solitary world gave way to a collective sharing. Suddenly we were all very aware of one another.

Speaking the Impossible by Shelley Rockwell

I live directly across the street from our neighborhood elementary school, and on 9/11 I sat on this school’s playground with my young children as they circled in a mix of playfulness and aimlessness. They knew something terrible was around[…]In this essay I will explore several poems as they mark a moment of estrangement, terrible disjuncture.[…]As psychoanalysts, poets in a sense, we must manage this same tension between the veridical, the real times we live in and what we and our patients confront…

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SOLASTALGIA by Hattie Myers

“Ever since college, I have had only one goal: to become minister of education and change the system in Afghanistan […]. I have worked so hard to reach this goal. Every night before going to sleep, I imagined myself in a ministry chair as secretary of education, but now I find myself imprisoned in the corner of a room.” With “tears in (her) eyes” a psychology student from Kabul University recalls August 15, 2021, the day her “palace of dreams” was shattered. 

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LEAVING THE HOLE by Susanna Stephens

It’s been more than a year in semi-lockdown, and I have to push myself to leave the hole I’ve been working and sleeping out of—the hole that is my bedroom, a kind of symbol of my libido, somehow both empty and bottomless. I know there is sun outside; I know it to be lovely, just as I know the woodcocks and catbirds are chirping; and if I close my eyes and open the windows, I can almost pretend I’m on a deck by the ocean, still alone.

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I NEED A GUIDE by Sandy Silverman

Early in the pandemic, I realized that what I needed was an instruction book that would tell me how to survive. I pictured it, a guide tailored to my personal needs, the first section titled How to be a Psychotherapist During a Pandemic and the second, How to Have a Homeless Brother During a Pandemic, and the last one, How to Not Give Up.

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BLACK AND BLUE by Lee Jenkins

We talk about the blues as sadness and transcendence of sadness. As an American Black, my experience tells me that it certainly seems to be both of these things simultaneously—contradictory things existing together, something we psychoanalysts know about. To me it’s about acceptance of the inexorable challenge…

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CLOSE UP by Hattie Myers

“An urgent sense of the possible contributed to my pursuit of psychoanalytic training over a decade ago, back when CO2 levels were still below 400 ppm. At the time, my analyst and my own analysis were introducing me to an unanticipated world of depth, beauty, and tolerable terror from which I rarely wanted to surface.” So begins Susan Kassouf’s essay, “A New Thing Under the Sun.” Kassouf quickly recognized that her new profession did not lend itself to thinking about the “more than human” environment, let alone climate catastrophe. “There was no useful language to describe what I was sensing,” she writes, so she creates the word she needs. Elaine Zickler understands Kassouf’s drive to find the right words.

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WORD, VOICE, BODY by William F. Cornell

As an article or essay that I am writing is nearing completion, I take the essential step of reading it aloud to myself. I have found that this practice helps me identify phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that feel awkward in the mouth, which I then imagine to be awkward in the ear of the readers. In the ear of the readers? Readers read with their eyes. But I have come to know, to feel, that when writing truly works, comes alive on the page, a reader is listening as well as seeing, hearing my voice. It is so very easy when writing to get lost in/entranced with one’s ideas. Writing, especially professional writing as most of us have been trained to do it, can so easily fall into expressions of disembodied intellect—words on a page, thoughts with no voice, ideas with no body.

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A NEW THING UNDER THE SUN by Susan Kassouf

An urgent sense of the possible contributed to my pursuit of psychoanalytic training over a decade ago, back when CO2 levels were still below 400 ppm. At the time, my analyst and my own analysis were introducing me to an unanticipated world of depth, beauty, and tolerable terror from which I rarely wanted to surface. At the same time, and still today, I was struggling to take in my lived experiences of marked changes in the weather along with a larger body of scientific research, which described climatic apocalypse in my lifetime. In my professional life—which spanned many years in the nonprofit sector as well as higher education—people were teaching, learning, and talking about smart, sustainable policies to reduce our carbon footprint, to mitigate and adapt. And yet, I wondered, what was everybody feeling? How were they sleeping at night? How did others handle what environmentalist Aldo Leopold described as “a new thing under the sun,” namely one species mourning the death of another or, in this case, the human species now mourning its own present and future?

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FROM BEIRUT TO SAN FRANCISCO by Karim Dajani

“AWASSNI, AWASSNI.” The man screamed these words before letting
out a guttural cry. Awassni is Arabic for “he shot me.” It had been some years since the war began, and most of us had learned to distinguish sound more keenly. We can tell, from the sound alone, how far the bullets are being fired from, the types of exploding shells and likely shrapnel radius, the type of warplane buzzing above our heads. Depending on the distance of the warplane, we learned to anticipate the time it took for a missile to reach the ground in a fiery explosion. Death, destruction, mayhem, and the screams of people dying and grieving would inevitably follow.

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ASSISTED PASSAGE by Jo Wright

The news photos—the bulky container ship straddled across the straight blue gash cut through yellow sands—prompted memories of my wonder and curiosity when, as an eight-year-old in June 1956, I gazed down from the deck of the P&O liner Strathaird at those sandy banks along the Suez Canal. I knew little of the world beyond the urban slums of northern England. Knew nothing of the lives, cultures, languages of the peoples I saw on my family’s journey aboard that migrant ship from England to Australia. Knew not that the opportunities awaiting us in Australia were inextricably linked to the color of my skin.

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OF FRUIT AND COVID by Santiago Delboy

I stood in front of the granadillas for what felt like an eternity, holding an empty plastic bag in my right hand and a shopping basket in my left. (A granadilla is a small South American fruit, with a round orange hard outer shell, and a white velvety layer in its interior, holding black seeds swimming in a gelatinous sweet pulp). The people at the store, likely rushing to get out of there as soon as possible, felt like ghosts that somehow managed to get around my inert body. My stupor probably looked like a staring contest with these fruits. Their passive silence did nothing but increase my confusion. Perhaps I was waiting in vain for them to give me some clarity, whether an answer to my shopping nightmare or something that would help me make sense of the last few days.