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“Ooooh, honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.” Rosa Parks said this in response to Bryan Stevenson as he described his work with the Equal Justice Initiative while sitting on an Alabama porch. In my mind, I imagine them sipping tea as they “spill the T1”: an almost quotidian moment to which I am magnetized. The moment stretches with Stevenson, Parks, and two other women, both civil rights activists and Parks’s contemporaries, Johnnie Carr and Virginia Durr, laughing aloud at Parks’s doom-filled comment. Just as the laughter that makes the experience of multigenerational and multiracial anxiety and trauma tolerable fades (and I find myself despairing), Ms. Carr responds, “That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.” Stevenson describes this afternoon as one where he “feels like a young prince.” Personally, I am acutely and painfully aware of how rarely one feels like “a young prince” within psychoanalytic training. Perhaps it is the realization of this absence that saddens me every time I read this paragraph in Stevenson’s (2015) book, Just Mercy.
My sadness deepens as I realize that it is not just an absence, it is a negation; the realization that I am psychoanalysis’s “unthought subject” (Brewster et al., 2025). Psychoanalysis purports to offer us universalizing theories of the human condition, but psychoanalytic institutions often skirt their own worldliness, often by delegitimizing the “engaged” critic.2 By way of example, at New York University (NYU), my analytic institute’s home base, on our “campus without walls,”3 the university put up a plywood wall in response to pro-Palestinian, antiwar activism on campus. The wall is outside the business school, preventing public gatherings on the plaza in front of it, rendering said plaza useless. An unironic and concrete answer to a symbolic need and a physical reminder of the ways one is invited (even seduced) into spaces of learning but often unwelcome. The wall, a response to