Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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 i...

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 wit...

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, ...

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 ...

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 iden...

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...

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 becom...

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 fant...

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 wh...

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, o...

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 lo...

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...

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 ...

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 Stojn...

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 t...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ph...