Trauma Archives - Public Seminar

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Mourning and motherland

June 20, 2024 • by Jordan Osserman

Within left-leaning circles, any attempt articulate an emotional tie to Israel is fraught—understandably, given the scandalous forms of censorship and repression facing Palestinian perspectives in the mainstream....

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Kinships

Traumatized Heroes

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Multi-Verse

Multi-Verse Episode 4: Gregory Kan and the Mysterious Human Brain

Withholding and world-building in poetry

September 7, 2022 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In Episode 4 of Multi-Verse, poet Gregory Kan reads poetry from his collection Under Glass and chats with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about writing trauma, challenging received wisdom, and the art of poetic restraint....

Literature

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

October 15, 2021 • by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the ...

Literature

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

October 15, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

On the publication of her new novel, Savage Tongues (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sat down with New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman to discuss the rhythms of language, the influence of light, shadow, and landscape on prose, and the historical and political context of intimate violence. ...

Migration

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

October 19, 2020 • by Arielle Rubenstein

In his three-volume work on the child’s tie to his mother, Bowlby includes this passage from a colleague’s description of the young child who has been separated from his mother. At the time, parent-child separation happened in routine circumstances, like the hospitalization of the mother or the child. Before it ...

Reviews

Void Bitches

To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world.

May 21, 2020 • by McKenzie Wark

If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because our bodies are a disaster already. Now that the whole planet has some kind of dysphoria, maybe it’s our time to shine. It’s a ludicrous idea, I know, but one reads in these times with a ...

Psyche

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

In a new cycle of poems, poet Isa Guzman explores their personal experience of gender-confirmation

February 18, 2020 • by Isa Guzman

1. I think with observable sunsets my mother’s bodily purging calm hums abstracted pigeons awake along a broken wall of context the way the hip doesn’t curve won’t ever the alienating anatomic bone structure of verbs growing winds and winding contours of hysteria anatomical witchcraft another day another extension of empty ...

Trauma, Transitioning, and “Puberty Book-Ended by Free Fall”

Psyche

Trauma and Race

A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 16, 2020 • by Sheldon George

On November 23, 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. During a verbal exchange with Davis over loud music being played by Davis and three friends, the shooter, a forty-seven-year-old white male named Michael Dunn, pulled out ...

Feature

On Postcolonial Remembering and Democratic Openings in Taiwan

An Interview with Former Political Prisoner, Fred Chin

September 26, 2019 • by Stephen J. Hartnett and Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge

Beginning with the infamous “228” massacres in the Spring of 1947, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) brutalized Taiwan with murder, torture, mass imprisonment, and relentless censorship -- this period has come to be known as the “White Terror.” The brave work of generations of activists led to the KMT finally lifting ...

Feature

An interview with Michael J Feldman

On Ghosts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

June 5, 2019 • by Michael J. Feldman and Josh Maserow

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis dives into the overwhelming and often unprocessed feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of marginality or ongoing melancholia. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting ...

Feature

Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis 2

A reflection on working with the transgenerational transmission of trauma

June 3, 2019 • by Michael J. Feldman

Aaron didn’t connect hunger or continuous travel with the flight of his father’s family during the Second World War. He didn’t relate a director ordering him around now with a domineering father bossing him around as a boy without protection from a depressed mother. Cutting ties to any childhood past, ...