The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times. The post The Writing on the Wall by Hattie Myers appeared first on ROOM A S...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. The post oranges by Kathleen Hellen appeared first on ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that makes us vulnerable. The post It Doesn’t Start with Prisons: A Psychotherapist’s Warning About Silence by Kissu Taffere appeared first on ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism. The post Fomenting Antisemitism by Timothy Snyder appeared first on ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not wanted. The post Hard Feelings by Thomas Casagrande appeared first on ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
Emily Weiskopf (b. Syracuse, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher based in Connecticut. She received a BFA from the Hartford Art School (CT) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (Philadelphia/Rome, Italy). Weiskopf’s work has been featured in Artnet, Gallerist NY, and The Brooklyn Rail, and has been exhibited with M. David & Co. (NY); Spring Projects (NY), Shin Gallery (NY), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and White Columns, among others. She was no...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would all just go away. I am used to being at least externally “okay,” even when many others are not. Whether rising above or cowering in fear, I lose my capacity to act from a grounded center. The post American Resistance: A Mayflower Meditation by Elizabeth Cutter Ev...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling at the top of his lungs, “The red sea of Communism is spreading over us all!” as he grimaced and pointed below to the crowd of booing students. As one of the few girls in this crowd, I stood among them, appalled, but silent and terrified. The post Red Scare...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
... While the Declaration cannot tell us how to respond to tyranny in our time, it can perhaps encourage us as the actions of the Trump administration become ever more lawless and the danger in the nation mounts. The post We Have Been Here Before: Reading the Declaration of Independence in 2025 by Richard B. Grose appeared first on ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and anti-Semitism? Why did this early event cause so much anguish and trauma in me thirty-five years after it happened? Was it because all nuns represented a kind of goodness in my six-year-old mind, a goodness that was shattered in an instant? The post The Wallet by Douglas H. Whi...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
Over the past decade, I have honed a new dialect—the language of psychoanalysis. Gradually, I find myself increasingly fluent in this language. Psychoanalysis, for better and worse, has shaped and molded my thinking. Yet, in its chiseling, some words confound my senses.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
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.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
As I write, student activists across the United States are protesting our collective complicity in the rampant human rights abuses underway in Gaza, including mass starvation and the confirmed death of nearly eight thousand children, with thousands more likely lost and injured under the rubble.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
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.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
This is the essay my therapist doesn’t want me to write. I wish that I could say that I don’t understand her concerns, but I do. She fears that it would place in the foreground something that most people who come to know me see only as a small part of me. It’s never been what defines me, so why run the risk of letting that happen now? I imagine she wants to protect me from being typecast as disabled and likely the recipient of all the associated projections that I’ve worked for years ...| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
Shari Appollon’s "My Mother’s Haiti" for ROOM 2.24 illustrates a kind of internal anguish children can experience when, from the start, belonging and not belonging are intertwined.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
As Freud taught, “looking back and in” is ribboned with unconscious resistance. Addressing the unintegrated and painful past of national trajectories, Jill Salberg looks at the grand-scale implications of this resistance in Fascism Amnesia: A Failure of Witnessing in ROOM 2.24.| ROOM A Sketchbook for Analytic Action
