Writing Workshops
Second Sundays Writing Group
Giving Voice to Your View: Writing at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society
Co-Leaders: Billie Pivnick, Ph.D. and Christine Maksimowicz, Ph.D.
Writing for publication can be a daunting prospect. During training, we learn a set of theories and develop a vocabulary that increase our competence with a body of knowledge and identify us as part of a guild. Yet less attention is paid to helping professionals develop their ideas in and through writing. In this group, participants will come with the germ of an idea or work-in-progress they have been imagining in published form, and the leaders will provide a structure for realizing this idea in writing, or suggestions on ways to enhance already well-conceived ideas. The emphasis will be on writing towards discovery of one’s unique contribution to a particular issue or problem within one’s field. The group will involve individual writing, as well as sharing and processing ideas with one another. The leaders envision the group as a series of web-based meetings that will meet monthly, on the second Sunday of each month, 8:00-9:30 pm EST, October, 2019 through June, 2020. The group is limited to eight participants.
Christine Maksimowicz received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her research bridges later 20th-century and contemporary fiction, class and gender studies, and psychoanalysis. Christine is currently completing a monograph entitled Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering the Self in the Working-Class Escape Narrative, a work that explores unrecognized classed injury in fiction and the pivotal roles imagination and self-narration may play in recuperative processes. Recent publications include articles in the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies and American Imago, and a chapter in The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Christine was awarded the 2016 CORST Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis & Culture by the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in January 2020 she will be a plenary speaker atThe Washington Center for Psychoanalysis’s New Directions Conference focused on the injuries of social class. Christine has been an American Psychoanalytic Association Fellow, a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a Silberger Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She presently serves as the book review editor for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and recently joined the editorial board of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.
Billie A. Pivnick, Ph.D. 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. 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, and is former head of the Graduate Dance Therapy Program at Pratt Institute. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of APA’s Division 39 and Co-Founder of “The Collaboratory,” a web-based learning community (sponsored by Div. 39 Sections 9 and 5) for psychoanalysts working in community settings, 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. She is the winner of the Division 39/Section Five 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, and the author of some two dozen articles published in academic texts and peer-reviewed journals. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, and on the Editorial Review Boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, J of Religion and Health, and the American J of Dance Therapy.
