Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with civil rights activist and lawyer, Douglas White. White examines the stoicism expected of young Black boys in the face of cruelty and injustice. Instead of staying silent or minimizing the past, White looks back at experiences in his own life, incisively navigating memory, history, and the reverberating psychological effects of race and racism in education. 
 

"Although I had been confronted by racism many times in my life, including being beaten, arrested, and jailed in a civil rights demonstration against segregation and Jim Crow in Durham, North Carolina, in 1963, I did not know what I would say when my turn came to speak."
— Douglas White, "The Wallet," ROOM 6.25

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Shari Appollon, a Haitian-American psychoanalyst who trained at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Appollon explores how her psychoanalytic training has complicated her vision of her family's origins in Haiti and her own experience in America. In caring for her mother at the end of her life, Appollon noticed parallels between not entirely knowing her own mother and not knowing Haiti. She unfolds how vulnerability in writing both exposes and fortifies the self.
 

"As children, my siblings and I were not allowed to travel to Haiti, out of fear that we would be kidnapped. For that reason, my grandmother lived in my mind as an omnipotent super-being in that she visited Haiti each and every year and managed to avert the mystical thugs who I feared would take her away with the request of a large ransom in return."
— "My Mother's Haiti," ROOM 2.24

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 conversation and literature that shapes our culture. 
 

"I could not stop dwelling on that first question: Can it hold me? Will I fit? My Goldilocks search for an analytic training program, and more specifically for a training analyst, has been a long one, spanning three institutes and nearly a decade." — Jamie Steele, "Mis/Fitting" ROOM 6.24

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. In their conversation with Isaac and Aneta, they unpack how they have been both supported and attacked merely for talking to one another. From a social experiment to a series of letters to an intimate piece of humanity and identity, this exchange holds the vulnerability and electricity needed to know and confront our current world.  

"Are we going to live in Heaven or Hell? The people of historic Palestine, all of them, must sit at one table and learn to feed each other, look out for each other, and protect each other. Otherwise, we will all starve in one way or another." — Karim Dajani, "Learning From All Things" ROOM 6.24

"You and I are holding each other for dear life. We want to be free of this vile situation, and in some ways we are. But if we actually want to make a difference, we need to understand where we too, both of us, are still unconscious of what drives the broken, agitated, and desperate collectives we find ourselves representing in this conversation." — Eyal Rozmarin, "Learning From All Things" ROOM 6.24

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 galvanize future direct action and connection. 
 

"We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course?" 

— Alexandra Woods, "Winter Into Spring," ROOM 6.25

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 potential environmental future. Far from being a dead-end, Gaitanidis outlines where and how hatred might galvanize us to take agency in our climate crisis, together.

"This collective holding of hatred points toward what a psychopolitical praxis might look like. It’s not about managing or suppressing these difficult emotions but about creating containers strong enough to hold them while they transform." — Anastasios Gaitanidis, "On Hatred," ROOM 2.25

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 intersect at sites of traumatic and recurring violence. 
 

"The path forward requires not just political courage but psychological courage—our willingness to face what we have become and what we are creating in our children’s developing psyches."— Irwin Kula, "Why We Can’t Stop Our Children from Dying of Gun Violence," ROOM 10.25

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