Episode 54 of Voices from ROOM: A Podcast for Analytic Action, “Close to Home with Shari Appollon” is now available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Listen Here!
This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with Shari Appollon, a Haitian-American psychoanalytic candidate at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Apollon explores how her psychoanalytic training has complicated her vision of her family’s origins in Haiti and her own experience in America. In caring for her mother at the end of her life, Apollon noticed parallels between not entirely knowing her own mother and not knowing Haiti. She unfolds how vulnerability in writing both exposes and fortifies the self.
“As children, my siblings and I were not allowed to travel to Haiti, out of fear that we would be kidnapped. For that reason, my grandmother lived in my mind as an omnipotent super-being in that she visited Haiti each and every year and managed to avert the mystical thugs who I feared would take her away with the request of a large ransom in return.”
— “My Mother’s Haiti,” ROOM 2.24