Parsing the Poetics of Place in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2018 | 7:30 — 9:30 PM
Practitioners and General Public: $40
Students: $10
2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, and Psychologists
Adam Phillips has characterized patients as “failed artists of their lives.” Patterns of coping that once were adaptive are now unresponsive or irrelevant to their current circumstances. It is as if they are writing the same story over and over without a fresh piece of paper. Philip Bromberg compares psychoanalytic treatment to a poem. If we imagine the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a better rendering of the self in the world, how can we use the lens of aesthetics to understand creative transformation in analytic work? How can an awareness of perceptual phenomenology help us see more deeply into the ways we interact with the world we inhabit? How can embodying the dimension of space as well as that of narrative time help us more fully apprehend the associations, allusions, metaphors, and rhythms of therapeutic dialogue? How can vitalizing spatial poetics help us work with the communicative collapse that often signals traumatic grief? Using poetry, literature, photographs, and clinical case material, this presentation will explore the spatial poetics of therapeutic care.
Billie A. Pivnick, PhD, is a psychoanalytic psychologist in private practice in Greenwich Village, specializing in treating children and families confronting difficulties with traumatic loss, including those that result from adoption and mass catastrophe. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of APA’s Division 39, as well as Memberat-Large of Division 39’s Section on Applied Clinical Psychoanalysis, she also served as Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design, the exhibition designers partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and the Smithsonian Institution. She is an instructor and supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program, The New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Writing, and the Columbia University Teachers College Doctoral Clinical Psychology Program. She is a former head of the Graduate Dance Therapy Program at Pratt Institute and former program development consultant to New England Rehabilitation Hospital. She is the winner of the Division 39/Section 5 2015 Schillinger Memorial Essay Award for her essay “Spaces to Stand In: Applying Clinical Psychoanalysis to the Relational Design of the National September 11 Memorial Museum” and IPTAR’s 1992 Stanley Berger Award for the contribution to psychoanalysis made by her research. She is the author of numerous articles and also serves on the board of directors of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, and on the editorial review boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Journal of Religion and Health.
Practitioners and General Public: $40
Students: $10
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