Close Up

Before we are born, everything is open In the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That's all we are.

“An urgent sense of the possible contributed to my pursuit of psychoanalytic training over a decade ago, back when CO₂ levels were still below 400 ppm. At the time, my analyst and my own analysis were introducing me to an unanticipated world of depth, beauty, and tolerable terror from which I rarely wanted to surface.” So begins Susan Kassouf's essay, “A New Thing Under the Sun.” Kassouf quickly recognized that her new profession did not lend itself to thinking about the “more than human” environment, let alone climate catastrophe. “There was no useful language to describe what I was sensing,” she writes, so she creates the word she needs. Elaine Zickler understands Kassouf's drive to find the right words. “We grasp for available language to explain what we see and what we do: the language of biology, the language of neurology and brain science, the language of quantum physics, even, as with Lacan, the language of linguistics.” Her essay, “Psychoanalysis in a Lyric Mode,” leans on the genius of Virginia Woolf to show how language can push us to the borders of our being. Zickler has come to see psychoanalysis as “an answering art… (it) is the responsiveness of the analyst to the stranger who speaks to us from her strangeness; it is the response that reveals our own strangeness as well.”

Bill Cornell gets the transformative power of words. “I found myself thinking,” he recounts in “Words, Voice, Body,” “about how often I see, I feel, how my voice and words land in the bodies of my clients, how often their words and voices land in mine, and of how the unspoken language of our bodies informs and enlivens our words. Spoken words that land in the body of another or written words that can be heard in the voice of the author capture the fundamental phy