Lauren Levine and the Film "Room"

Discussing on the morning of Nov 10, 2018 the Film Room in her presentation about mutual vulnerability at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society’s monthly speaker meeting, Lauren Levine, PhD noted how the protagonist (ironically named Joy), abducted and held captive and raped for seven years, must both stay enlivened for her five year old son Jack while also surviving her own deadening suffering. But how does one bear unspeakable trauma and stay enlivened when stuck in “the endless now,” Levine asks.

Listening, witnessing, taking in our patients’ narratives about their trauma gives voice, Levine says, to unfreeze time for them. But “therapists are penetrated by shards of the patient’s trauma,” resonating with the therapist’s own past. As Levine notes from Harris’ paper You Must Remember This: “the inevitable presence in the analyst of wounds that must serve as tools” (2009), it follows then we are thus also called upon to be mindful of our own self-care. In the discussion that followed a profound and amazing thing happened: The attendees enacted self-care by revealing their own horrific past traumas to a receptive, witnessing audience, a room full of clinicians.

Returning to the film Room, I had been struck by the lack of articles (a, the) when characters spoke about ‘room’ or ‘rug’ or ‘skylight.’ In Levine’s afternoon presentation titled ”The Faraway Nearby”  a possible meaning for this dawned on me. In using the writings of Rebecca Solnit - stories are geography and anchor us to place-- Levine helped me see that using articles would have made the place, the room which imprisoned Joy and Jack, too present, too real, thwarting Joy’s need to keep from their psyches the horrific thing happening in the now.