Literate Living: Literate Listening

Adam Phillips characterizes patients as “failed artists of their lives.” Patterns of coping that once were adaptive are now unresponsive or irrelevant to their current circumstances. It is as if they are writing the same story over and over without a fresh piece of paper. If we imagine the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis as a better rendering of the self, how can we understand creative transformation in analytic work through the lens of literature? How does the fiction analysts read affect how they listen and understand their patients’ narratives? How can characters from stories help us understand the dynamics of recurrent patterns of living? How can poets help us see more deeply into the ways we interact with the world we inhabit? How can the themes and poetics of texts help us more fully apprehend the associations, allusions, metaphors, and rhythms of therapeutic dialogue? How does an analyst’s own writing affect the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship?

Coordinator: BILLIE A. PIVNICK, Ph.D.

SANDRA BUECHLER, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. Her publications include Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment, Making a Difference in Patients’ Lives: Emotional Experience in the Therapeutic Setting, Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career, and Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature.

MARILYN CHARLES, Ph.D, ABPP is a Staff Psychologist at Austen Riggs Center, a Training Analyst with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. She is President of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association and co-chair of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is the author of five books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience, Constructing Realities: Transformations through Myth and Metaphor, Learning from Experience: a Guidebook for Clinicians, Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan, and Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live.

DODI GOLDMAN, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at William Alanson White Institute. Formerly the Book Review Editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, he is the author of numerous articles, including “Weaving with the World: Winnicott’s Re-Imagining of Reality.” He is the author of In Search of the Real: the Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott, and editor of In One’s Bones: The Clinical Genius of Winnicott. He is on the advisory board of the Israel Winnicott Center.

SOPHIA RICHMAN, Ph.D., ABPP is a Supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, and a faculty member of the Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Dr. Richman was born into the Holocaust in Poland and survived in hiding. In 2002 she authored the award winning A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust. Her most recent book is Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma. Dr. Richman is also a painter.”