Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Karim Dajani and Dr. Eyal Rozmarin, who began a correspondence through ROOM as Palestinian and Israeli analysts striving to comprehend Israel and Palestine and one another. Together, Dajani and Rozmarin have carried their difficult and vital conversation through the pages of ROOM, into a video, "Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine," and a forthcoming book. In their conversation with Isaac and Aneta, they unpack how they have been both supported and attacked merely for talking to one another. From a social experiment to a series of letters to an intimate piece of humanity and identity, this exchange holds the vulnerability and electricity needed to know and confront our current world.  "Are we going to live in Heaven or Hell? The people of historic Palestine, all of them, must sit at one table and learn to feed each other, look out for each other, and protect each other. Otherwise, we will all starve in one way or another." — Karim Dajani, "Learning From All Things" ROOM 6.24"You and I are holding each other for dear life. We want to be free of this vile situation, and in some ways we are. But if we actually want to make a difference, we need to understand where we too, both of us, are still unconscious of what drives the broken, agitated, and desperate collectives we find ourselves representing in this conversation." — Eyal Rozmarin, "Learning From All Things" ROOM 6.24

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Alexandra Woods, whose work operates at the intersections of the clinical, the personal, and the natural. As an analyst and a writer, Woods derives solace and inspiration from nature and activism. She explores the tension between how we connect and disconnect from the world around us, both environmentally and politically. Negotiating joy and obligation, Woods details how critical rest can galvanize future direct action and connection.  "We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course?" — Alexandra Woods, "Winter Into Spring," ROOM 6.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Anastasios Gaitanidis, a relational psychoanalyst based in London, whose work focuses on the intersection of psychological and political dimensions of cultural and environmental crisis. Relating to the work of Sue Grand and Josh Cohen, Gaitanidis shows where our hatred for the abuse of our climate, and our complicity in that abuse, stems from a love for our world, each other, and our potential environmental future. Far from being a dead-end, Gaitanidis outlines where and how hatred might galvanize us to take agency in our climate crisis, together."This collective holding of hatred points toward what a psychopolitical praxis might look like. It’s not about managing or suppressing these difficult emotions but about creating containers strong enough to hold them while they transform." — Anastasios Gaitanidis, "On Hatred," ROOM 2.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Irwin Kula, a seventh-generation rabbi and President Emeritus of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Kula unpacks his motivation to write on gun violence and the unnerving reality of how little has changed since Columbine. Tracing unconscious patterns, repetition compulsion, and the Lacanian "Real," Kula navigates where the inexplicable and the familiar intersect at sites of traumatic and recurring violence.  "The path forward requires not just political courage but psychological courage—our willingness to face what we have become and what we are creating in our children’s developing psyches."— Irwin Kula, "Why We Can’t Stop Our Children from Dying of Gun Violence," ROOM 10.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with JT Mikulka, an analyst and social worker whose work in ROOM unpacked tensions at the 54th annual IPA conference in Lisbon. Mikulka unbraids discovery from colonial vision—dissecting what is truly new and what is being presented as new for the benefit of its “discoverer.” Exploring colonial norms in the professional analytic world, Mikulka asks us to challenge what we have come to accept as normal. 

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Sara Taber, author, social worker, psychologist, educator, and daughter of a CIA operative. For the past five years, Taber has run Writing for Resilience workshops for underprivileged communities. Taber's recent work uplifting the voices and writing of Afghan women has provided critical aid and a needed expressive outlet for people whose very ability to speak is criminalized. Negotiating the risk of exposure with the growing need to platform these stories, Sara Taber has partnered with ROOM in the We Are The Light Series, available for free on ROOM's website. Taber showcases the bravery, wit, passion, and talent of these young women who are asking, above all else, to have their voices heard and their lives valued before it is too late.  "The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story."- Sara Taber "The Afghanistan Story" ROOM 10.24

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Xiaomeng Qiao, an analyst-in-training, writer, and game developer. Qiao examines the potential and the limitations of AI usage in analysis, self-understanding, and video game development. Qiao's work explores where generative technology can strike a harmony with analysis and where video games can mirror or enrich clinical work. "Despite the common perception of AI as all-powerful, I’ve discovered its profound limitations. Working with AI requires me to be a director, investing substantial effort in communication and curation. I cannot simply surrender control to the AI; the final decisions must be mine." — "The Seen and the Unseen: AI's Disquieting Impact," Xiaomeng Qiao, ROOM 6.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Kissu Taffere, a licensed clinical social worker whose clinical focus centers on women in BIPOC and immigrant communities. Taffere was laid off from a refugee resettlement organization shortly after the Trump administration came into office. She unpacks the roles of silence on the cultural and individual level, highlighting where it can be used to protect those who are vulnerable and where it is used in an effort to protect authoritarian and colonial power. 

At ROOM's fifth annual Gala held this past summer, we honored Lord John Alderdice with the Coline Covington Award for his courage in facing divisions, connecting communities, and forging peace through analytic thought. We are delighted to open our third season of Voices from ROOM with the Gala’s fireside chat between Lord Alderdice and Aneta Stojnić. They discuss the bravery required to face a dangerous and difficult world with transformative speech and writing. Alderdice stresses how vital it is to embrace new perspectives and foster communities that can survive disagreement. “Are there any indications of what kind of change in our thinking might bring us to the new paradigm I have talked about? Today, interdisciplinary connections are key. We have to move beyond our professional and academic silos.”— "Beyond Reason," Lord John Alderdice, ROOM 10.23Watch the video honoring Lord John AlderdiceNew episodes will be released twice a month on Thursdays;Listen and Subscribe today! 

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Ipek S. Burnett, author, cultural critic, and co-chair of the Human Rights Watch's Executive Committee. Burnett compares Robert J. Lifton's work on psychic numbing in the face of acute atrocities to the everyday psychic numbing in our contemporary life. She argues for exercising critical consciousness and imagination to face our political and environmental realities. For Burnett, psychological activism, or the courage to keep our broken hearts open, is an ethical responsibility to the collective and our children. Read Ipek's work in ROOM: "I ask myself, What can one do hurricane after hurricane? Wildfire after wildfire? All the droughts, floods, displacements? How can one go beyond witnessing?"— Ipek S. Burnett, "Hurricane After Hurricane," ROOM 2.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Rina Lazar, a clinical psychologist practicing in Tel Aviv who brings an anti-war perspective to current events from within Israel. Lazar explores the origins of the Israeli state, its contemporary actions, and what it means to be a part of something while opposing it. Struggling to be heard, Lazar juggles history with violence and belonging. Living in a country only a few years older than herself, Lazar's reflections show a complex perspective on propaganda, selfhood, nationhood, and how the war lives in the therapy office.Read Rina's work in ROOM:"As we find ourselves negotiating the need to belong with the need to detach, the therapeutic space can serve as a zone for intersubjective encounter between people who, in varying degrees, experience barriers between themselves and others, and within themselves."— Lazar, "Solitude, Resignation, and Hope" ROOM 2.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with licensed clinical social worker Max Beshers. Beshers applies analytic thinking in spaces ranging from private practice to anti-racism reading groups to local activism efforts in Chicago geared towards ending police violence. Beshers contends with what 'radical' means now and the fear stoked by being seen as too radical or not radical enough. Beshers unveils a personal history with identity politics that strives to find the place between the elastic and the rigid, the descriptive and the confining, as he engages with a diverse patient base and larger community."Over the years, “radical” as a leftist political stance has tempted and haunted me. I was and am inspired by the wildly creative visions of a different world, without racism, without violence, without prisons, and yes, even without police."— Beshers, "Free Radicals" ROOM 2.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Sue Grand, faculty and supervisor at the NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Grand dissects the constructions, destructions, erotics, and paradoxes necessary to building a fascist regime. Reflecting on her own and her father's experience with the echoes of Nazism, Grand unveils the urgent need to speak up, not stand by, as thought and speech themselves become more and more impossible. Read Sue's work in ROOM:"Once there were Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Now, in 2024, we have Putin, Orbán, Modi, and Trump. Democracy is at risk. In the United States, the enticement of fascism is manifest in MAGA fever." — Sue Grand, "Fascism's Erotic Register" ROOM 10.24

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Mary B. McRae, who describes her experience growing up in a segregated southern Black community, migrating to NYC as a teen, and her revolutionary days in groups like the Black Panther Party. Highlighting the importance affirmative action programs had for her generation, she reminisces about the doors that were open and closed to her as she made her way from being a young single mother to becoming a research psychologist, tenured professor, and current president of William Alanson White Institute.Read Mary's work in ROOM:"As a child, I played in this graveyard with other children. The pain and joy of those memories, owning our first house before losing it and migrating to New York. Not remembering difficult times or suffering is like dementia, a fear of repetition. I am the baby girl, the sixth of seven children, a sharecropper’s daughter." - Mary B. McRae, Notes from a Sharecropper's Daughter, ROOM 10.24

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Katie Burner, a therapist raised inside the Latter-day Saints faith. Burner unpacks how her Mormon upbringing and experience at institutions like Brigham Young University affect her relationships with her clients. Seeing both Mormon and non-Mormon patients, Burner navigates transference and countertransference inside her practice alongside a shifting relationship to the religion itself.

This week, Isaac and Aneta speak with Jill Gentile about how the liberatory and inclusive projects of democracy and psychoanalysis reflect and enable patriarchy. Suggesting that castration fantasy was psychoanalysis’s original conspiracy theory, Gentile draws our attention to the non-binary, non-unitary vaginal space as a repressed signifier of the multiplicity of otherness. Channeling Winnicott, she suggests that the birthing fantasies, misogyny, and the overt exclusion of others during Trump 1.0, which has led to the societal breakdown that Trump 2.0 portends, may provide the opportunity for collective renewal. "It is not accidental that the Trump era is characterized by a preoccupation with borders, immigrants, walls, reproductive surveillance, and a general fear of feminine space." - Jill Gentile, "Vaginal Veritas," ROOM 6.19

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Robert Frey about his work in international medicine and his direct action against the use of nuclear equipment to mine for oil in Western Colorado. Frey details how humor, identity, global politics, and environmental emergency may all congeal at moments of protest. Moreover, Frey emphasizes the critical interconnectedness that can be created by both political engagement and medical care when individual feeling is galvanized into collective action.

This week, hosts Aneta Stojnić and Isaac Slone speak with Michael Krass, a psychoanalyst and the president of the Contemporary Freudian Society. Krass shows how the disavowal of unconscious racism by liberal white Americans has contributed to the spread of openly racist attitudes and actions on the right. Following the presidential election results, many are juggling an external political reality with an internal pain, revulsion, or withdrawal; all reactions which Krass suggests show a failure at having truly known this nation, this climate, and ourselves.

This week, hosts Aneta Stojnić and Isaac Slone speak with psychoanalyst Jyoti Rao on her view of social justice activism as an interpretation of society itself. Rao unpacks how recent student activism across the US has disrupted the status quo just as clinical analysis aims to disrupt and mobilize the individual psyche. In this space of this discomfort, Rao suggests we may be invited to remember our humanity in the gut-wrenching love felt for civilians caught in the conditions of war. Read Jyoti's work in ROOM:"The humanitarian catastrophe underway calls for a redoubling of our commitment to care about the lives and well-being of others, a central aspect of psychoanalytic ethics that does not end at the consulting-room door." — Jyoti Rao, "Student Activism as Interpretation" ROOM 6.24

This week, hosts Aneta Stojnić and Isaac Slone speak with Tom Hennes, founder of Thinc Design. Hennes discusses his apprehension around the phrase "Never Forget" and its possible weaponization against accurate social and political memory. Through theory, fieldwork, and history, Hennes demonstrates how his past design work in the 9/11 Memorial Museum and his current work reshaping Riker's Island are impacted by a need for dialogue to create truly restorative justice.  Read Tom's work in ROOM:"The problem with traumatic loss is that it cannot be forgotten. Cannot even easily be placed in time so that it will cease to be an ever-present simulacrum of reality. I am coming to the idea that Never Forget is directed in a constraining way toward those inside these events." — Tom Hennes, "We Say 'Never Forget'" ROOM 6.24

This week, we had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Dean Hammer, a consummate Activist-Practitioner who refutes silence in the face of malignant normality. Hammer explains the pull of quiet compliance, especially during times of atrocity. We spoke with him about where his work in the classroom, the protest, and the clinical setting overlap.Dr. Hammer seeks a psychoanalytically informed community that invests in peace even as it operates with an awareness of the walls imposed by the justice system, the academy, and the flag under which it operates. We welcome you to read his essay "Reflections on Ploughshares Eight," published in ROOM 10.23.Thank you for listening,Your hosts, Isaac Slone and Aneta Stojnić Voices From ROOM will return in September. While we're away, we welcome you to listen to past episodes. We appreciate your ratings and reviews and can't wait to share a new season with you this fall.

In our conversation with Alberto Minujin, we learn about his work enfranchising the agency and identity of Latinx women in Queens. Minujin unpacks the mutual excitement and hesitancy of the participants' speech. These two emotions highlight the need for these women to acquire a caring, available, and action-taking audience for their words.Thank you for listening. Your hosts, Isaac Slone and Aneta Stojnić

This week we speak with Dr. Bandy X. Lee, editor of the best selling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and president of the World Mental Health Coalition, about her life-long work studying, predicting, and preventing violence.  As a clinician and academic Dr Lee felt called to action when, after the 2016 election, the US society was faced with what she presciently feared might devolve into violence. Expanding on the essays she published in ROOM during that time, Dr. Lee describes the continued personal and professional repercussions she has endured for speaking out. She implores us to pay attention to the signs of continuing danger.Thank you for listening,Your hosts, Isaac Slone and Aneta Stojnić

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Jill Salberg about the relationship between memory and fascism in American history. Dr. Salberg connects the memory loss caused by trauma in an individual with the political amnesia that allows fascism to occur (and recur) in a nation. Unpacking the dangerous complicity of passivity, Dr. Salberg shows us how creating and maintaining memory is active work and a political duty.Jill Salberg's essay is timely, and in conversation with many other voices we’ve published. She calls awareness to the political amnesia we are all susceptible to and centers the act of witnessing as critical to analytic action. Talking with her on this episode, we learned more about her motivations for taking on this dangerous forgetfulness and how it intersects with her writing and work.

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Fang Duan as she dissects the differing applications of psychoanalysis in the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. Fang details her own journey from China to Canada, discussing the gulf between the concept of the individual in the East and West. Across cultures, Duan unveils the agency that psychoanalysis and therapy can bestow on the individual story as it resonates with public reception. "Many factors contributed to this nearly perfect resolution of a celebrity family saga, leaving a deeply satisfying sense of catharsis and edification. What is interesting for my psychoanalytic thinking is the decisive role psychotherapy played in the unfolding of the story." — "A Celebrity Family Saga," Fang Duan, ROOM 2.22

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with poet Nancy Kuhl as she discusses the relationship between her practices in language and her work with psychoanalysis. Kuhl details how the tangle of metaphor in poetry can supply rich ground for examining the conscious and unconscious at work in our minds. In her latest book, On Hysteria, Kuhl responds to Freud's 1858 Studies on Hysteria and contends with the space where thought becomes physical. "My view of creativity was shifted completely [by psychoanalysis]. I came to think so differently about making meaning than I had before. And it’s not as if I hadn’t thought about language and metaphor and making meaning. I thought I had already given that a lot of consideration. But the [psychoanalytic] perspective is different enough and includes enough of the same kinds of interests [like] idiom, specificity of expression and speech, and voice … [these things] came alive in new ways." — Nancy KuhlRead Nancy Kuhl's Poem, "The Talking Cure" in ROOM 6.22.

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Zak Mucha about his experience working as a supervisor with an Assertive Community Treatment Program (ACT), providing 24/7 care to patients struggling with psychosis, and his own journey discovering psychoanalysis. Mucha unveils how psychoanalysis and poetry share so much commonality in their practices, approaches to understanding humanity, and statuses as unfinishable projects that extend beyond the individual life."Analytic work demands we incorporate the uncertainty of the world, the unknowable, into our existence. The horrific what ifs, what nexts, and shoulds and the dread of how do they see me exist, marking the unbearable anxieties left wordlessly outside of our narratives while driving our behavior."— Zak Mucha, "Reassembling Fragments," ROOM 2.20

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Betty Teng about her new book Mind of State, the dangerous cultural amnesia of nations enmeshed in cyclical war and climate denial, and the transformative potential of choosing to remember. Teng emphasizes the vital necessity of reckoning with trauma collectively, not just personally, as we face an election cycle that resembles our past. "A hallmark of suffering from trauma is silence. The impact of what happens to a survivor is so overwhelming they are challenged to speak. Neurobiologically, trauma can literally shut down the speech centers of the brain.”— Betty Teng, “Duty to Speak,” ROOM 5.17

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Dr. Daniel Benveniste about his time in the US and abroad, contending with the rise of totalitarian rule. Connecting his experience living in Venezuela with Donald Trump's two presidential campaigns in America, Benveniste analyzes how psychology shapes history and vice-versa. Benveniste reveals where and how diagnosis may fail to help us comprehend our dictators, both past and present, as well as where psychoanalysis offers tools for political thought and action."...what is activated by authoritarian leaders is the powerlessness of the infant in the face of infantile injustices—the pains of the body and being controlled by and at the mercy of parents. So, what do we do with that? We feel it, we remember, and then we recognize that although we once were powerless, we are no longer."— Dr. Daniel Benveniste, "Diving Into the Stream," ROOM 2.20

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Eric Shorey about his experience as a queer person, performance art organizer, and psychoanalyst. Shorey unveils his disappointment with the analytic community's inability to engage with queer performances and queer patients with the depth and humanity they hold for others. Shorey expounds on how queer people will continue to live as abstraction and stereotype within psychoanalysis as long as analysts remain closed to experiencing drag shows, gay bars, and queer life as real, lived-in spaces. "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."— Shorey, "Dragging Psychoanalysis," ROOM 10.23

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Destiney Kirby about her relationship with her hair as a Black woman in the internet-age, her complex interactions with her white mother, and the difference between independence and isolation in crafting the self. Kirby details a mosaic of family and societal pressures that contributed to her access to hair care and her ability to find and sustain community within her work in family medicine and public health."My hair could have been held in court as evidence of child neglect. My birth was preceded by an endless list of questions concerning paternity, but the dark, coarse corkscrews that sprang from my crown only served to lengthen the list." — Kirby, "On Hair Care," ROOM 6.23

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Dr. Murad Khan about their experience with authority, queerness, America, and how to speak to power. In the psychoanalytic field, the home, and in work, Khan shows how inculcation into power structures hinders intuitive access to justice. From their own experience, they detail how tone-policing while critiquing authority can be both a key and an obstacle to creating actual change as we all operate between a mesh of privileges and oppressions. "I had worked incredibly hard to leave Pakistan to pursue freedom in the United States—the freedom to choose movement in any direction with safety, love, and solidarity. After 9/11, I wasn’t naive enough to think going left would be safe in airports, streets, or online. Still, experiencing the cruelty of students and faculty with access to every possible educational resource, extinguished something in me—hope." — Murad Khan, Re/calibrating

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Shegofa Shahbaz, a writer, organizer, and college student whose piece in ROOM, "Letter to the United Nations" reached its addressee and the attention of the president. Shegofa discusses her life before and after the return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the danger and necessity of speaking up, and how accessible education is the key to addressing the subjugation of women everywhere. "I am writing this letter on behalf of all Afghan girls. I am Shegofa Shahbaz. I am twenty years old. I grew up among the dust and smoke of explosions, gunshots, fire, war, and sad stories. I grew up with fear." — Shegofa Shahbaz, "Letter to the United Nations" ROOM 6.23

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with ROOM's art editor Francesca Schwartz about how the meeting of image and text in ROOM capture elements of surprise, reverie, confusion, and deep feeling. Schwartz shares the unique process of art curation in ROOM and its connection to her work as an analyst and artist."I like some materials for their precision, others because of their elusiveness. Once in hand, alchemy takes over, and what happens is unexpected. So it goes, as the unconscious emerges. I tear apart, unravel, and desecrate in an effort to get to the center. I collage to bring cohesion to what feels fragmented."—Francesca Schwartz, ROOM 2.23

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Linda Michaels and Janice Muhr, the co-founders of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), about their advocacy against corporations who co-opt mental health as an industry for greed. From the clinical to the communal, Michaels and Muhr detail how their therapies of depth, insight, and relationship call them outside of the session and into the socio-political world, where they recently won a 40 million dollar case against Talkspace.  

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with artist Deborah Dancy about her art's unconscious relationship with psychoanalysis and its conscious relationship with the political. Dancy discusses how her artistic process embraces deeply-intentional research on her ancestry while holding room for the accidental to impact her expression.  "My work is an investigation of abstraction’s capacity to engage beauty and tension without justification or narrative." — Deborah Dancy, ROOM 6.22

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Ryan LaMothe about psychoanalysis and care in the age of the Anthropocene. LaMothe dissects the false binary between hope and despair and introduces Anarchic Care as a radical new form of psychoanalytic engagement. In the face of climate change, LaMothe details the need for analysts to take their work beyond the clinical and into the actively political as we confront a transforming Earth. "When it comes to climate change, there are various hopes and a good deal of wishful thinking at play. Both are problematic, yet hoping is at least as dangerous as idle wishing for a magical engineering fix to the problems we face." - Ryan LaMothe, "Hope in the Anthropocene Age," ROOM 2.22

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Roa Harb about food as a measurement of both distance and intimacy. Dr. Harb discusses how, through writing, she discovered that shared meals with her family in Lebanon were expressions of tenderness and suffocating control. Dr. Harb's work unmasks the role of the unconscious in memory, revulsion within desire, and survival through trauma. "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." - Roa Harb, "Feeding" ROOM 10.22

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Keiko Lane about the intersections of queer survival, the social valence of disease, and what it means to embody the earned rage, sorrow, and hope in a complex psychological world. Coming to clinical practice after years of political organizing and advocacy, Lane illuminates how care creates the proximities essential to both therapy and protest.

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Joseph Cancelmo about the after-effects of collective trauma and the numbing worlds of "new normals." Cancelmo dissects both the contemporary dissociations found in working and living "remotely," as well as the productive identifications we can find within narrative, even, (and perhaps especially) within fiction. "This developmental need to bond has suffered from the binary structure of maleness and femaleness. We now know such dichotomies to be psychologically inaccurate to the experience of most if not all men and women." - Joe Cancelmo, "The Elephant (Walk) in the Room," ROOM 10.18

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Dr. Kerry Malawista about the healing power of writing and psychoanalysis. Dr. Malawista illuminates the social and political impact of The Things They Carry Project, a series of writing workshops she developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to help participants process trauma and promote resilience through writing. This project is further detailed in Malawista's book, The Things They Wrote, published by ROOM in 2023.

This week, Aneta and Isaac talk with Dr. Eugene Mahon about the magic of metaphors in action, play as a point of entry, and the place where psychoanalysis and poetry meet."Serious daring surely comes from serious thought, which brings us back to psychoanalytic thinking and its multiple determinants. To arrive at serious daring as quickly as possible would seem to be the essence of psychoanalytically informed action." Eugene Mahon, "Playing for Real" ROOM 2.19

This week, Isaac and Aneta speak with Dr. Isaac Tylim about the political refuge psychoanalysis offers in Argentina and the U.S. and the collapse of the psychoanalytic 'fourth wall.' Tylim deciphers the demands of external and internal realities in the clinical setting and illuminates how writing can be a form of mourning. 

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Dr. Michael A. Diamond about how to radically reshape organizations by embracing contradictions, using history to challenge narrative structures, and recognizing transferential experiences that exist between members and leaders."Reparative politics refers to the holding of tensions between opposing parties, producing a third intersubjective space where imaginative compromise and policymaking are plausible. In theory, this collective act of restitution might eventually lead to a third narrative and a renewed democratic center in which the legitimacy of political opposition returns to the American body politic." - Michael A. Diamond, "The Fissure" ROOM 2.20New episodes will be released twice a month on Thursdays. Listen and Subscribe today!

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Dr. Vamik Volkan and Dr. Molly Castelloe about their film, Blind Trust: Leaders and Followers in Times of Crisis, Dr. Volkan’s groundbreaking ideas about chosen traumas and chosen glories, and the healing power of poetry.

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Lara Sheehi about living in a state of suspended grief, bringing a decolonial, revolutionary, liberatory perspective to psychoanalytic work, emigrating to the United States, and more.

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Coline Covington about how shifts in ideology affect us, how we struggle to maintain personal and group identities, how political events relate to our basic attachments, and more.

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Dr. Adrienne Harris about her timely piece, "My Back-Alley Abortion." They discuss Harris's personal experience, the implications of overturning Roe v. Wade, and what it means to step into the line of fire as a politically engaged clinician. 

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with Dr. Scott Graybow about the status of psychoanalysis in mental health education, mainstream narratives in mental healthcare, evidence-based therapy (EBT), and the importance of helping people think for themselves.

This week, Isaac and Aneta talk with psychoanalysts Phyllis Beren and Natasha Kurchanova about their experiences immigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union at different historic periods, finding a home in psychoanalysis, what it means to write autobiographically as analysts, and more.