Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory Webinar

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory
Webinar for Psychoanalytic Practitioners Working in Community Settings

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory is a consultation group for clinicians who want to apply a relational, psychodynamic framework to working in community-based programs focused on clinical, educational, community development, and social justice goals.
In community settings, psychoanalytic clinicians function simultaneously as citizens, collaborators, and consultants. Furthermore, the work we do is often interdisciplinary, characterized by an approach to groups and communities in which personal and cultural histories, the unconscious, and the socio-political surround are always at play.

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory objectives are to:

Bring psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, educators, and other practitioners into creative conversation on compelling and persistent problems in the communities in which they live and work;
Provide perspective and skills for the challenges of working in interdisciplinary teams;
Identify a set of resources and curricula reflecting new scholarship, reports from the field, and tool-kits for practice.

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory is a lively, supportive, and generative learning community with participants from all over the United States. Guided by facilitators, Jane Hassinger and Billie Pivnick, participants think together about the creation of innovative projects characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and transformative learning. Participants share dilemmas and challenges in practice including adopting new professional roles, working in interdisciplinary teams, understanding and navigating team processes, and responding effectively to phases of project development in target communities. Facilitators offer case studies and relevant scholarship, as well as provide supervision for implementation of projects.

This yearly web-based seminar group meets for a 12 – 14 session iteration via Zoom,

Mondays 7:00-8:30 PM EST, from February to June. The sixth iteration will begin in 2022.

The Section IX Education and Training Committee presents:

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory: An Innovative Methodology for Preparing Practitioners for Community Interventions

Saturday, November 13, 1-4 pm ET

Jane Hassinger LCSW, DCSW and Billie Pivnick, PhD

with

Marcia Black, PhD; Molly Castelloe, PhD; Pascale Denis, LMHC

Mohit Sharma, MSc; Gunjan Narang, MSc; Gil Kliman, MD

Sarah Scheckter, PhD; and Rena Shein, MFA, MA

The Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory’s unique pedagogy offers emerging leaders in community psychoanalysis valuable experiential learning for becoming productive members of community-based projects which entail psychologically complex group dynamics that can derail efforts at remediation, reconciliation, and repair. This presentation will highlight elements of theory, practice, and commentary from a group of former participants in the Collaboratory (both in attendance at the workshop and via pre-recorded excerpts from a recent Zoom-based focus group).

The Collaboratory was launched in 2014 by Jane Hassinger and Billie Pivnick to address challenges for practitioners who work within (or want to work within) community settings. A facilitated 12-14 week web-based seminar, project incubator, and experiential laboratory, the Collaboratory is informed by relational and group psychoanalytic frameworks that highlight group process, multiplicity, intersectionality, historical trauma, enactment, and mourning. Facilitation of the group is guided by democratic-humanistic values and norms that prioritize the value of all members’ contributions, difference/conflict, and empowerment. Each Collaboratory session is linked to a curriculum of readings, members’ evolving projects, and group process observation and discussion.

Over its five iterations, participants from around the world have shared innovative projects and explored relevant interdisciplinary scholarship. Projects have included culturally-attuned mental health initiatives, economic development programs in resource-strapped communities, documentary films, theatre pieces, art installations, and the creation of new community organizations such as schools and youth centers. The Collaboratory’s mix of nationalities, cultural identities, disciplines, and methodologies offer rich material for an evolving set of tools and practice principles for community-based practice.

Collaboratory participants create a temporary community in which the value of all voices and their concern for and mutual implication in struggles and successes of all are foregrounded. As members increasingly ‘take up roles’ in the group, a sense of ‘self-in-the group and group-in-the-self’ can be felt. Inspired by Eng and Han’s (2000) ‘psychic citizen’– an individual psychic development based on the immigrant’s struggle to preserve melancholic identifications during the process of assimilation—we term this intersubjectively constructed self-state the ‘relational citizen’. Within this inherently relational experience, freighted with historical trauma and culturally-normative unconscious processes, members reveal increased capacities for multiplicity, empathy, and interpersonal perspective-taking.

For more information, please contact facilitators: Jane Hassinger, jahass@gmail.com or Billie Pivnick, drbilliepivnick@gmail.com

FACILITATOR BIOGRAPHIES

Jane Hassinger, MSW, DCSW Certified Psychoanalyst works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is retired from the Women’s Studies and Psychology faculty at the University of Michigan. She is a supervising analyst at the Michigan Council for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and teaches at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Her research is multi-focal and interdisciplinary, emphasizing the intersections of gender, race and historical trauma. Her scholarship explores gender and race as critical factors in identity formation and life experience, resilience, and the psychoanalytic situation. Jane’s community-based research projects include: “Community-based Responses to the Mental Health Needs of Survivors of Gender-based Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo”; “Providers Share: Global Narratives from Abortion Providers”; and “South African Women in Collectives: Lifting Up Lives by Lifting the Silence around HIV/Aids”. Her book, Women On Purpose: Resilience and Creativity of the Founding Women of Phumani Paper (with Kim Berman) was published in 2012.

Billie Pivnick, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in NYC, specializing in treating children, adults and families confronting difficulties with traumatic loss, including those that result from adoption and mass catastrophe. She is faculty and supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child/Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program, the New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Writing, and Columbia University Teachers College Doctoral Clinical Psychology Program. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of APA’s Division 39, she is co-host of the podcast Couched. Additionally, Billie is Consulting Psychologist to The Parkside School and to Thinc Design, the exhibition designers partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum. She is the winner of Division 39’s 2015 Schillinger Memorial Essay Award for “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.