ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action

Project Background

In 2016, I joined a group of analysts members of the New York Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research to create a solution that provides the analytic community with an accessible forum to bring different perspectives bearing on the complex problems facing the nation.

Since then, I joined Dr. Hattie Myers as a co-founder and creative leader of ROOM—an interdisciplinary initiative focused on developing a community-based media platform, devoted to serving as a public space able to engage its audience as co-creators of a societal transformation action.

After four years of uninterrupted publication, ROOM transformed from a local communication initiative to an international social turn model that invites greater familiarity with psychoanalysis as an essential lens for personal, cultural, and political discourse.

ROOM Roundtable, IPA London, 2019.
ROOM Roundtable, IPA London, 2019.
Project Description

A Socially Engaged Media Model

ROOM has been forged through the unique partnership of classical psychoanalysis, design principles, and informational technology. While the art of psychoanalysis historically has focused on the individual, the intersection with design helped ROOM to become a tangible space, providing different media for the community to access the dialogue, making ROOM’s transformative psychoanalytic mission societal.

Marrying the technique and art of classical psychoanalysis with the principles of informational technology and design, ROOM is a new “techne” or “art” of social change. It is this unique interdisciplinary relationship between classical psychoanalytic technique, design, and informational technology; and between analytically informed essays, art, memoir, poetry, and roundtables, that is singularly responsible for ROOM’s powerful reach, and makes ROOM unlike other analytic journals, magazines, or community actions.

As a psychoanalytic art, ROOM falls within a new category of art called “social turn.” This new category in the art field encompasses socially engaged artistic practices (like psychoanalysis, design, writing, poetry, music, etc.) to create and design solutions in the form of models and programs with the purpose of closing a cultural gap to produce substantial and sustainable changes within the community. This practice poses the community members as the key actors that makes the transformation possible and effective through different levels of involvement, commitment, and participation.

ROOM 10.20, Print Edition.
Results

ROOM’s uniqueness

In ROOM, we approach each new submission cycle in a way that loosely draws upon the techniques of free association, neutrality, and evenly hovering attention. Unlike many other publications, where submissions are expected to fit an already established theme – or where submissions are chosen based only on their individual qualities, the content selected for ROOM is derived from themes that emerge out of the submission cycle. In this way, the premise of each issue emerges organically from the community and each new magazine reflects a particular moment of our history.

We make room for a diversity of voices, for different registers, for a multiplicity of ideas, and for various styles of communicating. The poetry and art are curated after the submission cycle is over and are chosen to resonate with the selected essays. The editorial provides a synthetic introduction to the issue as a whole, and the unique design of each issue mirrors the new global concept in spatial terms. As a result of this process, each issue of ROOM is cohesive and unique. As a community project, ROOM, is made possible through the level of focus each submission receives with respect to its meaningfulness, newness of thought, and quality of expression — and each issue of the magazine is more powerful than the sum of its parts.

ROOM’s website has become witness to the world’s quickly changing socio-political reality. Psychoanalysts understand that the connection between the present, the past, and the future provides a valuable framework to understand the concept of social change and act in consequence. From the perspective of archival work, we believe that ROOM’s website has become and will remain a valuable and unusual analytic cultural contribution.

ROOM Totebags / Collectible

Platform Reach

In the 12 issues published since 2016, ROOM has been downloaded over 20,000 times and our website averages approximately 1,500 unique visitors a month. Following each issue, a roundtable takes place that deepens the discussion between authors and provides readers the opportunity to participate directly in the conversation. There have been 11 roundtables to date. Held in NYC prior to the pandemic, the roundtables attracted approximately 12-18 psychoanalysts and non-mental health participants. The last two roundtables have been held globally on Zoom and over 100 registrants participated from Aleppo to Seattle.

ROOM is now read across the United States and in over 100 countries. The magazine is published three times a year in three formats: a free downloadable PDF and an online Web Archive, and, as 2020, it is also available to be purchased in Print-on-Demand through Amazon and other worldwide distributors in Europe.

ROOM IPA London Poster on Femininity
About ROOM

Responding to an unsettling and turbulent political reality, Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is devoted to maintaining connections to ourselves and to our community through writing, art, music, and activism – disciplines that share with psychoanalysis a capacity to uncover the ‘hard to reach’ corners of our humanity. We invite contributions from mental health professionals, writers, artists, photographers, and musicians working all around the world. The editors have a hand in bringing forth new meaning in each iteration of ROOM by identifying the central themes which emerge within each submission cycle. In this way ROOM parallels the psychoanalytic process; it is co-constructed and organic to itself.

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