We are living in a time of great dying. Climate change is drying up our water and destroying vulnerable species; a pandemic is claiming the lives of over a million people worldwide and changing much about our ways of life. How do we register the magnitude of these losses?  When we lose individuals, we eulogize them to help keep them in memory.  When we lose great people, we elegize them to contextualize their importance to society.  When we lose not just individuals and heroes but an entire way of life, we craft epics to register the sweep of history and mourn change on a grand scale. When we lay people to rest, we locate them in psychic as well as physical space through inscribed epitaphs, processions, and music. This weekend will help us grasp mourning on a scale beyond those we are accustomed to managing. The uses of imagination, myth, memorial, ritual, music, and literature will be considered, as will the interplay between the mourners’ personal experience and that of the mourned.

Coordinator: Billie A. Pivnick, Ph.D.

GUEST FACULTY:

Jonathan Lear, Ph.D., teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic theory at the University of Chicago.  He is also a trained psychoanalyst and does clinical work in consultations and supervisions with other analysts and psychotherapists.  His most recent book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life, was named one of the top twenty notable nonfiction books of 2022 by the Washington Post.  His book Freud was ranked number one by the Guardian (UK) in its top-ten list of psychoanalytic books.  Other books include Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony, Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, A Case for Irony, and Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul.  Lear is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Kate Daniels, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.  She is the author of six collections of poetry: The White Wave, The Niobe Poems, Four Testimonies, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret, Three Syllables Describing Addiction (2018) and In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (2019). The White Wave received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. Among her honors are the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard (now known as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study); the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry; two Best American Poetry selections; the Pushcart Prize; and election to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her poems have been anthologized in more than seventy five volumes, and have appeared individually in journals such as American Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review.   She has also edited a volume of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and co-edited Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly.  An affiliate faculty member in Medicine, Health, and Society, she also teaches writing at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, and conducts community workshops on Writing for Recovery for people whose lives have been affected by addiction.

Tom Hennes is the founder of Thinc Design, a New York based, internationally recognized firm that has developed innovative and influential exhibition designs for museums, national memorials, aquariums, cultural attractions, and Olympic and World Expo pavilions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Significant projects include the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Empire State Building Observatory, the U.S. Pavilion at the World Expo in Milan, Terra, a museum of sustainability in Dubai, and most recently, the groundbreaking Ocean Pavilion at the Seattle Aquarium. Believing in the power of exhibitions and other forms of experiential space to engage society in important ways, he has pursued an ever-deepening involvement within and beyond exhibition and memorial projects toward a design practice that is broadly embedded in social and environmental justice. For nearly twenty years, he has worked within an evolving conception of Relational Design, a psychoanalytically-based approach developed initially in collaboration with Dr. Billie Pivnick toward shaping physical and social environments around open-ended human experience, learning, and growth, and around the way people and groups relate to each other and to the narratives, artifacts, and opportunities for interaction they encounter there. Beginning in 2023, he has led a Human Experience Design Consultant team for the Borough Based Jail Program for the City of New York, conducting extensive workshops with a wide range of constituencies within and around the jails on Rikers Island, and working with the different City agencies and the architectural teams developing four new jails in Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Manhattan. He has written extensively on the multi-faceted role of experiential design and has taught and lectured widely. From 2008 to 2016, he was an editor of Curator: The Museum Journal, and since 2020, he has been a Trustee of the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology.

Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP, is Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), he is past president of the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP) of the APA, and the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is on the Advisory Board of the Sigmund Freud Museum of Vienna. In 2016, he was co-editor with Eliot Jurist of the special supplement of Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA) on “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities.” In 2017, he founded the NYU Human Rights Work Group. In 2023, year he received the SPPS Award for International Activism for Social Justice. He practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and runs creativity study groups.

Billie Pivnick, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic psychologist in private practice in NYC, specializing in treating people suffering from traumatic loss and problems related to adoption. She is faculty/supervisor in the William Alanson White Institute Child/Adolescent Psychotherapy Program and co-chair of WAWI’s Center for Public Mental Health. Co-Chair of the Humanities and Psychoanalysis Committee of APA’s Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, she was a co-host of the Couched podcast, which features conversations between analysts and influential cultural figures. She was also 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 community problems. Additionally, she is Consulting Psychologist to Thinc Design, partnered with the National September 11 Memorial Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Orlando’s OnePulse Foundation, the Las Vegas Forever One Memorial, and the Brooklyn Borough Jail Design Project. Author of over thirty professional articles, she was the winner of the 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 her contribution to psychoanalysis. Formerly Visiting Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Dance Therapy Program at Pratt Institute and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Columbia University Teachers College Program in Clinical Psychology, she is also faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Writing at the Washington/Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She is also an Associate Editor for the International Journal for Applied Psychoanalytic Studies and Contemporary Psychoanalysis.