Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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 beyo...

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 si...

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 w...

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 ...

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...

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 opera...

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. <...

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 o...

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 4...

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...

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.
 

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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...

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 fr...

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, ...

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.&...

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 p...