Bravery

“Acts of bravery stand out in our minds because they signify a common belief system that we, individually and collectively, matter.”

“Bravery,” Coline Covington, a psychoanalyst living in London, told me last spring, “exists in the eyes of the beholder. No one who has done something that other people consider brave or even heroic feels that they themselves have been brave. To a person, they feel they had no choice. Not only that, each one of them felt badly they couldn't do more. I am thinking of writing an essay for ROOM about it.”

But Covington didn't write that essay. Instead she wrote “No Joking Matter.” “ROOM may not want to print it,” she said. “Things change so fast every day that Trump's visit to London may be old news by October, but this is what I had to write.”

This morning, well after this issue was in production, I got a call from a psychoanalyst in New York: “You may not have room for this in ROOM, but I have an idea about the Kavanaugh hearings that I can't stop thinking about and no one is talking about it.”

Within two hours, Joseph Cancelmo's essay “The Elephant (Walk) in the Room” arrived. He was right. We stopped the virtual press in order to include the thing that no one was talking about in an already very full issue.

It is not the first time that psychoanalysts are seeing something and feel they have to say something. It's not the first time that we have been stopped in our tracks to make room for a new way to think about something.

In 1941, Ernst Kris, newly arrived in the US under an “enemy alien visa,” gave a paper to the Boston Psychoanalytic called “On the Dangers of Propaganda.” Perhaps because Kris had come to psychoanalysis through the field of art history, he was particularly attuned to the power of image and media. “My reason for dealing with this subject is not the challenge which its highly flavored topicality may exercise,” he told the Bostonians. “I