You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Democracy, psychoanalysis, and Room share a powerful connection. They were created to contain and facilitate the many voices that comprise (and conflict with) our polities, ourselves, and, in the case of Room, the space between ourselves and our societies. This is not coincidental. As Jill Gentile explains in her book Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, there is a resonance between the method of free association underlying the work of psychoanalysis and the right of free speech which is the bedrock of democracy. And how does Room fit in? Right in the middle. Room could not exist outside of a democracy in which free public speech was possible, nor would it exist without the analytic principle of free association that guides its submission process.
Even so, none of us anticipated the power of the essays, poetry, and art which would come to be contained in this issue. Room 6.19 cannot be read lightly. Download it. Go back to it. Go slowly. Each of these authors and artists demand close attention. They are not of one voice. They do not intend to be. But they form as cohesive and inclusive a whole as Room has ever published. And it is no coincidence that the center of this issue involves women.
Room 6.19 is a clarion call to mind the gap that exists between our conscious awareness and our unconscious being-in-the-world. In The Culturing of Psychoanalysis, Karim Dajani reminds us of what Erikson and Freud knew: that it is culture that provides the human infant with a shared system of meaning-making that makes it possible for them to understand and be understood and take their place in civilization. But Dajani goes further and deeper. Culture, he writes, inserts itself into our souls. Culture shows us how to understand, use, and live in our bodies; it is the nucleus around which our bodies and theories and power structures are organized. If psychoanalysis ignores culture's primordial and constituent role in our theories, our bodies, our states of mind,