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That's how it started And I don't know how it will end. But still, from beyond the valley, From the pain, and from distance We shall forever go on calling out to each other: “We'll change.”
“Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language…” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino's “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.
In You Know How Mami y Papi Get, Eliza Jaquez finds ways to enliven the dry universality of psychoanalytic concepts. She describes being stopped in her tracks by a term like “object relations”: “This (psychoanalytic) language palette is significantly muted when compared to the vibrant magentas coating my English or the bursts of flamingo pink saturating my Spanish,” she writes, “but once I walk through that linguistic portal, my homegrown blend of Spanish serves as a reminder that on this side of the looking glass, we are not objetos. We are gente.”
When they take the psychoanalytic terms “transference” and “interpretation” onto a South African farm or onto US college campuses, Mark Solms and Jyoti Rao also are also walking us through a “linguistic portal.” In Student Activism as Interpretation Rao explains how the work of social justice activists functions like psychotherapy when activists are “imploring us to attend to our collapsed and curtailed capacity for love.” She connects the attributes of psychoanalytic interpretation: introjection, catharsis, insight, identification, and working through to social justice activism in universities. C