Woolf at the Door

I am sitting in my office, thinking about rooms.

Writing for Room has prompted this state of reverie, during which one of my favorite works, A Room of One's Own, passes through my mind. In her essay, Virginia Woolf writes of the necessity for women to have money and a room of their own in order to write fiction. What is most salient for me about Woolf's piece at this moment, as I think about the thousands of children who remain locked in immigration detention centers, is not her actual argument but the title — what it means for one to have a room that is safe and secure and familiar.

Inside my consulting room, I have the privilege of existing in this state of uninterrupted thinking. I have a door and am in control over who comes and goes and when I do the same. I am sitting in a chair that is comfortable; I can sit quietly to think and write. I have windows to look out of and that let the sun in, and I imagine Virginia Woolf would argue that it is largely because of all of these things that I am free to engage in this uninterrupted thinking.

It is no easy task to think about what space we, as psychoanalytic psychologists, occupy in the fight against this policy of inhumanity and trauma. And certainly each of us will feel differently about the room we permit this to take up in our minds, not to mention how we are reconciling or dissociating the reality that — regardless of who has control of the House or who is elected in 2020 or the outcome of the Mueller investigation — the impact of the rooms these children are kept in will outlast administration changes in the rooms of the White House. The reality we know is that the rooms in which these children are kept will affect their internal worlds and their interactions with the world around them.

Woolf's recognition that the freedom of our minds is interwoven with the rooms we occupy and the spaces we are permitted, or not permitted, into seems particularly salient as thousands of human beings, children no less, are intentio