Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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 a...

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 i...

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 wit...

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 unf...

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 s...

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 dic...

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 stereo...

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 wit...

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 cre...

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...

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. Onc...

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...

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 e...

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 co...

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 mothe...

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 ne...

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&...

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 psychoanal...

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 im...

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.