ABSTRACT
ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action is an interdisciplinary digital and print psychoanalytic magazine that began after the 2016 US presidential election. ROOM is devoted to expanding the relationship between individuals and society through psychoanalysis while building community connections through arts and literature. ROOM is part of a new category of contemporary art called “social turn.” Social Turn was first used in 2006 by the art historian Claire Bishop in her 2006 essay The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents. The term describes a return to art that is collaborative, often participatory, and involves people as the medium or material of the work. With media technology, ROOM uses the techne or the art of psychoanalytic practice to create a new space for community and social transformation. While the art of psychoanalysis focuses on the individual, ROOM’s digital format made our transformative psychoanalytic mission societal. ROOM has become a new analytic space for social change. This chapter describes the importance of such a project to contemporary psychoanalysis, shares an example of our process and the work that has emerged from it, and shows the local and global reach and power of ROOM’s unique interdisciplinary methods.
