Seriously Now

Room 2.19 is about the powerful intrapsychic and geopolitical forces that threaten to hijack our minds, souls, and agency —and along with that, our communities and countries. The authors cross three generations, and their essays have arrived from all over the world. They are addressing boundaries lost and found, stretched and permeable; identities destabilized and reconstituted. And from different perspectives, each writer calls upon us to think carefully and act decisively because our future depends upon it.

In Speaking Up about Trump: An Experience of a Lifetime, Bandy X. Lee, editor of the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, describes the price she has paid for daring to suggest that government officials and mental health professionals have an ethical responsibility to speak. Reading about the slander and death threats she endured, it was clear to all of us on the editorial board that, in another country, Lee would have been jailed. In this country, she is still free to tell what happened. Yitzi Katz also tells us what happened after he spoke up: nothing.

In A Bathroom Without a Seat, Katz interprets the psychoanalytic meaning and ethical implications of a clinic in Jerusalem willfully disconnected from the concrete needs of its clients. His story makes a larger point as he illustrates how universal aspects of care and healing are embedded in the particularities of physical space. In her essay Woolf at the Door, advocate Dana Sinopoli carries Katz's point from Israel to the US–Mexico border: “It is impossible to separate the physical spaces these children are kept in from the message that there is no room in this country for people like them.” What Sinopoli, who is a candidate in psychoanalytic training, doesn't tell us is that six months ago, she authored a letter in response to the zero-tolerance policy, which was signed by over 21,000 people and 200 organizations and was delivered to all three b