Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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.