Forum Live: Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN
In these polarized and starkly individualistic times, what role do depth therapists have in fostering participation in group and community life?
On June 24th, PsiAN announced its latest partnership -- the Community Collaboratory @ PsiAN. The Collaboratory is a project incubator for depth-oriented mental health practitioners who want to apply a relational, psychodynamic framework to developing community-based programs. Programs may focus on clinical, educational, community development, and social justice goals. The work of the collaboratory, enriched by interdisciplinary and cross-cultural resources, is 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.
In this PsiAN Forum Live, we heard from Billie Pivnick about the development of the Collaboratory, and her and Jane Hessinger’s vision of the role of depth therapists in the community. We also heard from past participants about how experiences of group citizenship in the Collaboratory inspired and fostered their exciting community-based projects and initiatives.
Our panelists:
Molly Castelloe holds a Ph.D. from New York University with a focus on theater and psychology. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals on psychoanalysis and writes a blog for psychologytoday.com on group psychology called The Me in We. Her documentary film on psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan garnered The Gradiva Award and has been screened at the Freud Museums in Vienna and London, The Hague and on PBS. She is a candidate at The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.
Pascale Denis received her medical degree in Psychiatry from Haïti and worked as a licensed psychiatrist for over 10 years before moving to the United States. Pascale Denis is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who received her Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Miami. She works with a diverse population, with a focus on gender, sexual and affectional orientation, as well as challenges associated with acculturation for first- and second-generation immigrants. In November 2012, she started and is still facilitating a free monthly cancer support group, in Creole, for Haitians with cancer, and their caregivers, the only one in Miami-Dade County.
Jane Hassinger, LCSW, DCSW, is a Psychoanalyst in Ann Arbor, Michigan and retired University of Michigan faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a member of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society and on faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California’s Group Process program. Jane’s interdisciplinary projects have addressed significant global challenges including: Global Providers Share Program (with Lisa Harris, MD), Community responses to survivors of gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (with Nobel Laureate Dennis Mukwege, MD) and Women on Purpose: Ending Silence around HIV/AIDS in South Africa (2005-2012, with Kim Berman, MFA, PhD). Her publications include “The Community Turn: Relational Citizenship in the Psychoanalytic Community” (2022, with Billie Pivnick) and “Twentieth Century Living Color: Racialized Enactments in Psychoanalysis” (2014). Her book, Women On Purpose: Resilience and Creativity of the 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 and families confronting difficulties with traumatic loss, including those that result from mass catastrophe. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of American Psychological Association’s Division 39, she is co-host of the podcast Couched which features conversations between analysts and various artists, academics, and influential cultural figures. Consulting Psychologist to The Parkside School and to Thinc Design, she was an integral part of the Thinc design team for the National September 11 Memorial Museum and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. She is the winner of the APA’s Division 39’s 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 the IPTAR’s 1992 Stanley Berger Award for the contribution to psychoanalysis made by her research.
Rena Shein’s practice seeks strength-based approaches between Western healing psychotherapeutic modalities, Aboriginal knowledge systems and practices and Contemporary Art. As an artist-therapist with an inheritance of migration and cultural displacement, her multidisciplinary practice takes place at the juncture of relationship to people and place engaging with notions of materiality, memory and healing.
To find more information on our presenters and their community projects, check out the links below!
Biennale of Sydney - look up participants John Kelly and Rena Shein
Exhibition of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney
Blind Trust: Leaders & Followers in Times of Crisis, by Molly Castelloe
Publication on a presentation to the American and British Art Therapy associations