Separation Is Never Ending: Attachment Is a Human Right

Why 40 researchers say attachment is a basic right and separation a clear wrong

For over 75 years, psychologists and psychiatrists have known that abrupt and/or prolonged separation can have major implications, including depression, anxiety, and behavioral disturbances. In 1952, Bowlby & Robertson argued, “There is now evidence that prolonged periods of maternal deprivation in very young children can, in some cases, give rise to extremely ...
Read More
Separation Is Never Ending: Attachment Is a Human Right

God Bless the Child?

Reflections on Families Belong Together, Trumpism, and the politics of resistance

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington While recent primaries have furnished some reason for modest hopefulness (see for example my piece last week on the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), in a broader sense recent political developments have further darkened the already dark ...
Read More
God Bless the Child?

Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace

Shifting Frames and Floating Bodies

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis: Its Function and Structure in Contemporary Psychoanalytic theory, edited by Isaac Tylim and Adrienne Harris, explores, and troubles, the idea of "the frame" at a time when the concept is undergoing both a systematic recrudescence and widespread transformation within psychoanalytic theory. It has always ...
Read More
Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace

Summer Reading

Understanding – and Overcoming – Slavery’s Long Legacy of Inequality

Summer reading is mostly supposed to be light books that go with beaches and barbeques. I’m recommending three books that, while not light, will have the paradoxical effect of making you feel better about these difficult times! How can that be, you might ask. We are approaching the 400th anniversary of ...
Read More
Summer Reading

Building Health Homes for Kids

New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape

New York has begun its ambitious project to re-engineer health care for low-income children. In a new report, Building Health Homes for Kids: New York’s Reforms for Children on Medicaid Finally Take Shape, the Center for New York City Affairs looks at the opportunities and challenges presented by the State’s first major ...
Read More
Building Health Homes for Kids

Why the U.S. Should Ratify the Convention on Children’s Rights

The Trump administration’s policy on immigrant families makes it clear that the U.S. needs a child rights treaty now more than ever

The Trump administration’s forced separation of migrant children from their parents as a way to coerce Congress to agree with its proposed immigration policies is problematic on numerous fronts. Not only is it immoral but it is also damaging for the children involved, resulting in harms that range from toxic stress and abuse, to human rights violations. It has been ...
Read More
Why the U.S. Should Ratify the Convention on Children’s Rights

Irony and Historical Detachment

Analysis/discussion of pastiche in social media

This second interpretation is what I want to focus on. I want to show that instead of being a form of humor the graffiti in this image is representative of a strain of urbane, ironic detachment that has become pervasive in Anglophone cultures over the past decades. I want to ...
Read More
Irony and Historical Detachment

How To Do Things Without Words

Silence as the power of accountability

A jarring phenomenon of the Trump presidency is that words are cheaper than they’ve ever been in my half-century-long life. Yet behind this cheapness, silences appear, difficult and important to feel. There is the silence of an estimated 4,645 deaths in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria. There’s the ...
Read More
How To Do Things Without Words

How You Can Help Immigrant Children Separated From Their Families

We need to take action against the U.S. government’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ Policy

We stand in support of a humane and equitable immigration path, policy, and process for all people. The federal government’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy promises to prosecute all persons who illegally cross the border, which includes individuals who seek asylum. Under the zero tolerance policy, thousands of children were forcibly ...
Read More
How You Can Help Immigrant Children Separated From Their Families

“No Gods, No Masters”

Antisemitic tropes and utopian ideals in imagining and resisting capitalism

This piece was prepared for a short talk as part of “Navigating finance and the imagination: A collaborative theoretical walking tour ”, an event organized by Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, that took place in London in April 2018. Participants in this interdisciplinary event drew on Cornelius Castoriadis’ work to explore ...
Read More
“No Gods, No Masters”

Remembering a Campus Free Speech Fight

In the 1990s, the culture wars did not always drive us apart: sometimes we learned to respect each other more

On June 10, 2018, Doug Bennet, a historian, political aide, assistant secretary in the State Department, former president of National Public Radio and—most importantly to me—president of Wesleyan University, died at the age of 79. It's rare that you see someone bring such a rich background to the executive office ...
Read More
Remembering a Campus Free Speech Fight