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In the recent Broadway musical The Prom, four aging Broadway actors cast about for a way to revive their flailing careers. They seize on a news story about a lesbian teenager in a rural Indiana town who is being prevented from attending her high school prom and decide to descend on the town to publicly champion her in hopes of garnering attention for themselves, raising themselves again to public attention.
The situation is ridiculous, but I was riveted by the satirical attention the play's conceit brings to a real phenomenon: the narcissism that not infrequently can be found in the mix of motives that spur activism. I thought of the musical as I set about reading Barbara Eisold's new book, Psychodynamic Perspectives on Asylum Seekers and the Asylum-Seeking Process: Encountering Well-Founded Fear. By contrast with The Prom's protagonists, Eisold is exceedingly modest in her description of what brought her to the volunteer work of performing evaluations of people seeking asylum in this country. For her, it's an antidote to the isolation of her therapy practice, bringing her into contact with asylum applicants, as well as the organizations and lawyers that request these evaluations to bolster the legal cases for their clients, and with the translators usually needed to conduct the interviews. One feels her curiosity to learn of lives quite different from her own, as well as her desire to be of practical help to people who have suffered a great deal. While she has been doing this work since 2002, it has taken on added meaning for her in the context of the Trump administration's crackdown on those legally seeking asylum in this country. Eisold rightly understands this work to be political.
I found most compelling the early chapters in which Eisold describes her reactions to the experience of performing the evaluations. While