Publication Announcements by Billie A. Pivnick (USA)

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

(2023). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 71(1): 165-170.

When beginning her career, the psychoanalyst and MIT professor of psychology Sherry Turkle realized that since “real life is lived with thought and feeling joined,” she could shed light on both social-emotional life and scientific thinking by studying how people change through interacting with technology – and how technology in turn changes how we think about ourselves and our increasingly complex world. In her recent memoir, The Empathy Diaries, she shares her dire conclusion: our technology is leading us to severely devalue personal connection and empathy. This cogent, lively memoir transports us through Turkle’s life and loves from 1948 to 1985 to show how she used her personal human experience to derive theoretical insights about how minds and machines mold new ways of thinking and being.

Homing in on Adoption: Dreaming, Drawing, and Telling Stories in Relational Psychotherapy

(2023). Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 22(1): 62-75.

Adoptees and their families long for a relational home in which they can feel safe and accepted. Parents’ and children’s divergent histories, experiences, and visions of the future can make that vision a challenging one to achieve. As an adoptive mother and a clinical psychologist, the author is deeply familiar with seldom-considered aspects of the adoption experience, including mismatched rhythms, struggles for recognition, loss aversion, and uncertainty borne of absences in family stories. This article presents a relational model for treating adoptees and their families that highlights parent engagement and employs both nonverbal and narrative modalities so that a joint vocabulary can develop, leading to new stories that are co-created, coherent, and sustaining despite the gaps they inevitably contain. Adoption thus construed becomes not just a loss, but also an opportunity for growth for all three of the parties to the adoption triangle. The article outlines key developmental dilemmas, presents a repertoire of techniques for drawing out nascent self-experience, and employs illustrative clinical vignettes to assist clinicians in encountering the often-overwhelming affects and impasses common in working with these families.

The Relational Citizen as Implicated Subject: Emergent Unconscious Processes in the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory

Pivnick, B.A. & Hassinger, J.A. (2023). In R. Kabasakalian-McKay & D. Mark (Eds.), Inhabiting Implication in Racial Oppression and Relational Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Historian and Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg argues that US citizens are all implicated in the crimes of history, particularly chattel slavery, and thus share in the web of costs, benefits, and accountability. As a remedy, he urges psychological exploration of the tensions baked into our multiple group identifications, cultivation of an ethos of mutual aid, and community engagement. Although this can occur in individual therapy, it is best achieved in group settings in which the psychic and social meet in ways that can be observed from multiple perspectives. In this chapter, we discuss the mutually constitutive interactions between Rothberg’s (2019) concept of “implicated subjectivity” and a new construct that we (Hassinger & Pivnick, 2022) have called “relational citizenship.”

The ‘Community Turn’: Relational Citizenship in the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory®

Hassinger, J. & Pivnick, B.A. (2022). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103(1): 120-143.

Drawn from five years of experience in the web-based Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory, this paper explores implications of the “community turn” in psychoanalysis for roles, methods, clinical theory, and training. With participants from many parts of the world, the Collaboratory has become a creative generator of projects, including documentary films, community memorial initiative, and mental health interventions in highly-stressed communities. The Collaboratory’s unique pedagogy offers valuable experiential learning about the complex intersubjective dynamics common to group and community life. Through reflection on the interpersonal dynamics of three critical incidents, we illustrate the interplay of intrapsychic and political aspects of identity – what we have termed “relational citizenship,” an intersubjective self-state in which the individual and the sociopolitical are psychically linked and where the challenges of identifying with and belonging to one or more collectivities are recognized and negotiated.

Billie A. Pivnick, Ph.D.
New York, NY, USA
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