Re-Vision

For Freud, nearing the end of his life, the fateful question for the human species came down to whether and to what extent our cultural development would succeed in mastering the disturbance our aggressive and self-destructive instincts inflict upon our communal life.

“Men,” he wrote in the last sentences of Civilization and its Discontents, “have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness, and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘heavenly powers,’ eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.” Eros's immortal adversary, Thanatos, was life's somber and inexorable drive toward death. Two years later, in 1931 as Hitler ascended to power, Freud went back to this paragraph and added one last line, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”

Now as then, no one can foresee what will happen next.

With over a million souls dead from COVID, with droughts, fires, and floods rendering the earth uninhabitable; with the hatred and fear we train toward each other engendering new ruthless alliances; and with the US presidential election in just few days determining the fate of its democracy, if our “cultural development” is to succeed in assuring our survival, it must step in quickly. The analysts, poets, and artists featured in ROOM 10.20 are seizing this darkness as an occasion to illuminate a new beginning.

From the heart of a maximum security prison Rocío Barcellona bears witness to the depths our society has sunk to. In “Collective Disappearance,” she finds no hope. “I became aware,” she writes in the midst of the COVID epidemic, “of the spaces we inhabit between person and disappearance, marching toward and against erasure with our inmates. At times our presence is th