Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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.