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

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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.