Likening the “Other”: Identifying and dis-identifying in adoptive parenting

Publication Announcements by Billie Pivnick (USA)

Pivnick, B.A. (2018). In Adelman, A. (Ed.), Psychoanalytic reflections on parenting teens and young adults: Changing patterns in modern love, loss and longing. NY & London: Routledge.

Adoption is a highly interactive, intersubjective experience for the adoptee, adoptive parents, birth parents, and communities. All have their own stories and perspectives that enter the flow of family life. So that adoptees don’t feel lost in translation, they must be helped to find themselves in relation to friends and family members, whether present, lost or imagined. Although they are born to someone else, the process of adoption requires that they also are borne. I call that three-way process “likening the Other.” It is not until they can be accepted as both impossible to know and equally impossible not to recognize that adopted children can truly feel they fit. The children, in turn, have to bear (all) their parents – despite parents’ often misguided intentions and misattunements. Learning to bear one another can require that families “unthink” what they imagine they already know.

Behind the lines: Toward an aesthetic framework for psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Pivnick, B.A. (2018). . Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74:218–232.

This article describes the author’s development of an aesthetic approach to psychoanalytic psychotherapy of patients suffering from traumatic levels of grief by describing her experiences as a patient, a therapist, and a consultant to the design firm that partnered with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Using Aristotle’s On Poetics as an inspiration, this article explores the ways dialogical storytelling creates a therapeutic “action-plot” that transforms reversals of fortune. Attending to patients’ first-person phenomenological experience (without attributing cause), therapists help them transform their losses by listening to their stories. Therapists dwell with them in uncertainties while marking time in regularly scheduled meetings; they accompany their patients on a journey while also orienting to their modes of travel. They simultaneously coconstruct tales of the journey, attentive to the poetic dimensions of sight, sound, and space that they encounter. In so doing, therapists serve not just as guides and judges, but artists, bringing meanings to the trail.

Parsing the Poetics of Place in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Presentation Announcement by Billie Pivnick (USA)

Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, NYC, November 2, 2018.

Adam Phillips characterizes 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 Pivnick, PhD
15A East Tenth Street
New York, NY 10003   USA
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