CRITICA

I am pleased to announce that Critica is now online, our current issue available for reading, downloading or purchasing in print. Hope you all enjoy the new format and continue to support us by reading and submitting!

Our editorial board has grown once more. Mirian Barraza joined us as the PINC candidate’s representative and liaison. She is a first year analytic candidate at PINC and is bi-lcutural and bi-lingual in Spanish. We are very excited to have her be part of our team.

Our current theme is Shattered Peaces. For some unconscious reason, I insisted on engaging with our current theme through moving from shattered to scattered, back and forth. Those two words would mix in my mind and get expressed through my voice. My Freudian Slip entices my curiosity: how shattered and scattered converse, or interact even?

When choosing this theme, our editorial board tried to explore the pieces of our current shattered reality and how this broken experience affects our inner peace. We also debated between scattered and shattered, wondering what would convey the invitation we would like to open up. The ways in which we, human beings, have been (un)able to find each other felt like an interesting area for investigation, the pendulum repeatedly tipping towards othering, fear and aggression. Reality feels as if broken into pieces, our inner life forever imploded in scenarios that require containment and intervention, peace nowhere to be found. Shattered Peaces, this is where we landed. Why is it that my mind insisted on Scattered Peaces? The pressure of a disorganized, deflected, diffused, broken up experience forcing itself into my consciousness, scattered all over, dispersed into incomprehensible pieces scarcely put together.

In this issue, I found writers, poets, artists, psychoanalysts, engaging with the complexities of human experiences that explode into broken pieces. In their reflections, poems and images, they attempt to find some order in the chaos, or at least put words into their (and others’) experience. They explore the wounds; navigate the aftermath of destruction; wonder about what has been silenced or kept invisible; consider dynamics that underlie shame, guilt and indifference; question war and aggressiveness; expose their pieces and how they built the puzzle of their own emotional life; show us the way into scattered and shattered realities in the hope to find a peaceful anchoring.