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 failur...
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. Re...
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 R...
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 sys...
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...
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...
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...
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 psychoana...
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 t...
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 c...
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 ...
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...
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 evide...
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...
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 Sha...
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 tea...
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...