Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Jamie Steele, a licensed marriage and family therapist and psychoanalytic candidate. Steele unpacks an encounter with fatphobia in psychoanalytic training, prompting questions of what bodies are permitted and which are shamed in psychoanalytic spaces. While analysis has shown a growing interest in understanding embodiment, Steele explains how subaltern bodies are still largely excluded from the...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Karim Dajani and Dr. Eyal Rozmarin, who began a correspondence through ROOM as Palestinian and Israeli analysts striving to comprehend Israel and Palestine and one another. Together, Dajani and Rozmarin have carried their difficult and vital conversation through the pages of ROOM, into a video, "Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine," and a forthcoming book. I...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Alexandra Woods, whose work operates at the intersections of the clinical, the personal, and the natural. As an analyst and a writer, Woods derives solace and inspiration from nature and activism. She explores the tension between how we connect and disconnect from the world around us, both environmentally and politically. Negotiating joy and obligation, Woods details how critical rest can galva...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Dr. Anastasios Gaitanidis, a relational psychoanalyst based in London, whose work focuses on the intersection of psychological and political dimensions of cultural and environmental crisis. Relating to the work of Sue Grand and Josh Cohen, Gaitanidis shows where our hatred for the abuse of our climate, and our complicity in that abuse, stems from a love for our world, each other, and our potent...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Irwin Kula, a seventh-generation rabbi and President Emeritus of Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. Kula unpacks his motivation to write on gun violence and the unnerving reality of how little has changed since Columbine. Tracing unconscious patterns, repetition compulsion, and the Lacanian "Real," Kula navigates where the inexplicable and the familiar inters...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with JT Mikulka, an analyst and social worker whose work in ROOM unpacked tensions at the 54th annual IPA conference in Lisbon. Mikulka unbraids discovery from colonial vision—dissecting what is truly new and what is being presented as new for the benefit of its “discoverer.” Exploring colonial norms in the professional analytic world, Mikulka asks us to challenge what we have come to accept as norm...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Sara Taber, author, social worker, psychologist, educator, and daughter of a CIA operative. For the past five years, Taber has run Writing for Resilience workshops for underprivileged communities. Taber's recent work uplifting the voices and writing of Afghan women has provided critical aid and a needed expressive outlet for people whose very ability to speak is criminalized. Negotiating t...

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Xiaomeng Qiao, an analyst-in-training, writer, and game developer. Qiao examines the potential and the limitations of AI usage in analysis, self-understanding, and video game development. Qiao's work explores where generative technology can strike a harmony with analysis and where video games can mirror or enrich clinical work. 

"Despite the common perception of AI as all-powerful, I’v...

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...