Jan Abram, PhD
Giving Voice to Your View: Writing at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society
January through June, 2026
(the class will meet for eight 1.5 hour sessions between January and June, 2026. The instructor and participants will determine together the evening dates and times.)
ZOOM
Billie Pivnick, PhD is a psychoanalytic psychologist in private practice in NYC specializing in treating adoptees and their families, victims of trauma, and people in the arts. She is faculty/supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child/Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program, faculty in the WAWI Psychoanalytic Certificate program, Director of WAWI’s Center for Public Mental Health (CPMH), and founder of the CPMH “Schools as Refuge Project” (SARP). Winner of the 2024 Leadership Award of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (SPPP), she is also co-founder and co-host of the 2024 Gradiva Award-winning Couched podcast, which features conversations between analysts and influential cultural figures. Author of over thirty professional articles, she won SPPP’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 of her study, Symbolization and its Discontents: The Impact of Threatened Object Loss on the Discourse and Symptomatology of Hospitalized Psychotic Patients to the field of psychoanalysis.
She is faculty for the New Directions Psychoanalytic Writing Program at the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. She also serves as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and onthe Board of Directors of the Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS). As Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Orlando’s One Pulse Foundation, the Las Vegas Forever One Memorial, and the Brooklyn Borough Jail Design Project, she helped the designers and their partners mitigate the traumatic impact of exhibits. She also engaged with group processes that typically impede projects that touch on traumatic histories of the participants to minimize their impact. Formerly, she was co-founder and co-leader of the Psychoanalytic Community Collaboratory, a web-based seminar and project incubator for psychoanalytically informed projects focused on innovative interdisciplinary responses to significant community problems and was Director of the Graduate Dance Therapy Program at Pratt Institute.
Seminar Title: Giving Voice to Your View: Writing at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society
Seminar Description: Writing for clinical presentation or publication can be a daunting prospect as professional writing means working at the intersection of the scholarly and the creative. During training, we learn a set of theories and develop a vocabulary that increases our competence with a body of knowledge and identifies us as part of a guild. Yet less attention is paid to helping new professionals develop their ideas more authentically in and through writing.
The instructor envisions the class as a workshop that provides both an in-class writing experience and writing that takes place outside the classroom. In this workshop, participants will come with the germ of an idea they have been imagining in presented or published form. The idea may be a case study or a reflection on your experience as a clinician. The emphasis will be on writing to discover one's unique perspective on a particular issue or problem within the field. The instructor will provide a structure for beginning to realize this idea in writing or suggestions on ways to enhance already well-conceived ideas. Fellow participants likewise contribute ideas and expertise throughout this process.