Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

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 normal. 

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 the risk of exposure with the growing need to platform these stories, Sara Taber has partnered with ROOM in the We Are The Light Series, available for free on ROOM's website. Taber showcases the bravery, wit, passion, and talent of these young women who are asking, above all else, to have their voices heard and their lives valued before it is too late.    "The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story." - Sara Taber "The Afghanistan Story" ROOM 10.24

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’ve discovered its profound limitations. Working with AI requires me to be a director, investing substantial effort in communication and curation. I cannot simply surrender control to the AI; the final decisions must be mine." — "The Seen and the Unseen: AI's Disquieting Impact," Xiaomeng Qiao, ROOM 6.25

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 is used in an effort to protect authoritarian and colonial power. 

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 with transformative speech and writing. Alderdice stresses how vital it is to embrace new perspectives and foster communities that can survive disagreement.  “Are there any indications of what kind of change in our thinking might bring us to the new paradigm I have talked about? Today, interdisciplinary connections are key. We have to move beyond our professional and academic silos.” — "Beyond Reason," Lord John Alderdice, ROOM 10.23 Watch the video honoring Lord John Alderdice New episodes will be released twice a month on Thursdays; Listen and Subscribe today!  

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, psychological activism, or the courage to keep our broken hearts open, is an ethical responsibility to the collective and our children.  Read Ipek's work in ROOM:   "I ask myself, What can one do hurricane after hurricane? Wildfire after wildfire? All the droughts, floods, displacements? How can one go beyond witnessing?"— Ipek S. Burnett, "Hurricane After Hurricane," ROOM 2.25

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 herself, Lazar's reflections show a complex perspective on propaganda, selfhood, nationhood, and how the war lives in the therapy office. Read Rina's work in ROOM: "As we find ourselves negotiating the need to belong with the need to detach, the therapeutic space can serve as a zone for intersubjective encounter between people who, in varying degrees, experience barriers between themselves and others, and within themselves." — Lazar, "Solitude, Resignation, and Hope" ROOM 2.25

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 identity politics that strives to find the place between the elastic and the rigid, the descriptive and the confining, as he engages with a diverse patient base and larger community. "Over the years, “radical” as a leftist political stance has tempted and haunted me. I was and am inspired by the wildly creative visions of a different world, without racism, without violence, without prisons, and yes, even without police." — Beshers, "Free Radicals" ROOM 2.25

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 and more impossible.  Read Sue's work in ROOM: "Once there were Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. Now, in 2024, we have Putin, Orbán, Modi, and Trump. Democracy is at risk. In the United States, the enticement of fascism is manifest in MAGA fever." — Sue Grand, "Fascism's Erotic Register" ROOM 10.24

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 becoming a research psychologist, tenured professor, and current president of William Alanson White Institute. Read Mary's work in ROOM: "As a child, I played in this graveyard with other children. The pain and joy of those memories, owning our first house before losing it and migrating to New York. Not remembering difficult times or suffering is like dementia, a fear of repetition. I am the baby girl, the sixth of seven children, a sharecropper’s daughter." - Mary B. McRae, Notes from a Sharecropper's Daughter, ROOM 10.24

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Katie Burner, a therapist raised inside the Latter-day Saints faith. Burner unpacks how her Mormon upbringing and experience at institutions like Brigham Young University affect her relationships with her clients. Seeing both Mormon and non-Mormon patients, Burner navigates transference and countertransference inside her practice alongside a shifting relationship to the religion itself.

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 fantasies, misogyny, and the overt exclusion of others during Trump 1.0, which has led to the societal breakdown that Trump 2.0 portends, may provide the opportunity for collective renewal.   "It is not accidental that the Trump era is characterized by a preoccupation with borders, immigrants, walls, reproductive surveillance, and a general fear of feminine space." - Jill Gentile, "Vaginal Veritas," ROOM 6.19

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 when individual feeling is galvanized into collective action.

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, or withdrawal; all reactions which Krass suggests show a failure at having truly known this nation, this climate, and ourselves.

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 love felt for civilians caught in the conditions of war.  Read Jyoti's work in ROOM: "The humanitarian catastrophe underway calls for a redoubling of our commitment to care about the lives and well-being of others, a central aspect of psychoanalytic ethics that does not end at the consulting-room door." — Jyoti Rao, "Student Activism as Interpretation" ROOM 6.24

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 for dialogue to create truly restorative justice.  Read Tom's work in ROOM: "The problem with traumatic loss is that it cannot be forgotten. Cannot even easily be placed in time so that it will cease to be an ever-present simulacrum of reality. I am coming to the idea that Never Forget is directed in a constraining way toward those inside these events." — Tom Hennes, "We Say 'Never Forget'" ROOM 6.24

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 as it operates with an awareness of the walls imposed by the justice system, the academy, and the flag under which it operates. We welcome you to read his essay "Reflections on Ploughshares Eight," published in ROOM 10.23. Thank you for listening, Your hosts, Isaac Slone and Aneta Stojnić   Voices From ROOM will return in September. While we're away, we welcome you to listen to past episodes. We appreciate your ratings and reviews and can't wait to share a new season with you this fall.

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 Stojnić

This week, we're speaking with Dr. Bandy X. Lee about her book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, her work in ROOM, and the call to political writing she experienced after Trump's first rise to power. Stretching the classical borders of her identities as a clinician and an academic, Dr. Lee shows that the state of American politics demands that psychiatrists speak up for the health and safety of the American public. 

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 Salberg's essay is timely, and in conversation with many other voices we’ve published. She calls awareness to the political amnesia we are all susceptible to and centers the act of witnessing as critical to analytic action. Talking with her on this episode, we learned more about her motivations for taking on this dangerous forgetfulness and how it intersects with her writing and work.