The Anniversary

Anniversaries exist as a demand to remember and, as such, they have a great deal in common with the work of psychoanalysis. Looking back from the vantage of ROOM's first anniversary, it is amazing to recall that ROOM might not have happened at all but for a fortuitous accident.

Twenty days after the 2016 elections I received an email that had not been intended for me to read.

“Hello from (Trumpland) The heartland, I am so fucking pissed I can barely see straight right now and I wanted to share with you the editor's response to my piece… She butchered it!!! I'm thinking if they don't publish it I'm going to publish it myself and send it out to the entire community anyway. I need some helpful validation right now SOS! And if this is a sign of things to come and it's happening in an analytic community, OMG!! Peace and love and more peace and love… We need it or maybe I should say I need it! XO Margaret”

Margaret Fulton, a psychoanalyst practicing in Minnesota, wrote this e-mail to a few of her close friends but inadvertently sent it to hundreds of mental health professional on a national listserv.

Intrigued, I asked Margaret for the back story. It turned out that she had been invited by her local analytic society to write a short essay on the subject of ‘play’ in psychoanalysis, and they had just rejected the essay saying it was “too political during a time when it was important to strike a balance.” She was furious.

The essay had begun non-controversially enough with a quote from the British psychoanalyst, Winnicott: “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play.” D.W. Winnicott .

But after the election, Margaret's interest took a turn and she