FEATURE
Weekend Conferences
Weekend Conference Schedule
| Date | Conference |
|---|---|
| November 3, 2011 | Introduction for New Students |
| November 4–6, 2011 | The Bereft Therapist, The Grieving Writer |
| February 3–5, 2012 | On Writer’s Block |
| April 27–29, 2012 | Inspiration in Our Writing: Who Are Our Heroes? |
| October 12–14, 2012 | Queering the Couch |
| February 8–10, 2013 | The Mind of the Child in the Adult |
| May 3–5, 2013 | Home Again |
Introduction for New Students
November 3, 2011
New students are invited to attend a program orientation at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday evening, led by the New Directions co-chairs.
The Bereft Therapist, The Grieving Writer
November 4–6, 2011
Writers and analysts share the task of interpreting and mediating experience through language. Psychotherapy seeks to understand, contain, and help patients through pain and loss, while writing can deepen a reader’s appreciation of complex human experience.
This weekend examines how personal and unexpected loss, inside or outside the consulting room, affects analysts and writers. Participants explore how therapists and writers process loss, how it influences their work, and how their work may help them navigate grief.
Coordinators: Anne Adelman, Ph.D., and Kerry Malawista, Ph.D.
On Writer’s Block
February 3–5, 2012
The conference considers the psychoanalytic history of writer’s block alongside contemporary, pragmatic understandings of creative blockage. It examines the metaphor’s analytic foundations and the experiences commonly associated with being unable to write.
Creative writers, writing teachers, and psychoanalysts contribute perspectives on blocked creativity. The weekend also offers practical ideas intended to help writers begin moving words onto the page again.
Coordinator: Kate Daniels, M.F.A., M.A.
Guest Faculty
- Karen Earle, M.F.A., M.S. is a psychotherapist, writing instructor, poet, New Directions graduate, and leader of the program workshop Beyond Creative Block.
Inspiration in Our Writing: Who Are Our Heroes?
April 27–29, 2012
This conference examines the personal heroes who inspire writing. Analysts and writers discuss the people who influenced their work, the ideas of valued thinkers and teachers, and the qualities that drew them to those figures.
Participants consider how their work changed in response to these influences and explore the roles of identification, idealization, conflict, and defense in professional development as writers and analysts.
Coordinator: Deirdre Callanan, Ph.D.
Queering the Couch
October 12–14, 2012
The conference addresses psychoanalysis’s history of pathologizing non-normative expressions of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation, as well as contemporary efforts to connect psychoanalytic thought with insights from philosophy, gender studies, and queer theory.
Participants consider gender and sexual diversity from a queer perspective and explore how queer theory can inform their lives and work as analysts, therapists, and writers.
Don Chiappinelli, L.C.S.W., together with Gail Boldt and Oren Gozlan, coordinates the weekend.
The Mind of the Child in the Adult
February 8–10, 2013
Guest Faculty
- Mary Sue Moore, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and educator whose research has addressed attachment theory and the effects of trauma on the developing brain.
- Mary Target, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, and Professional Director of the Anna Freud Centre.
Dr. Target will also conduct an optional full-day workshop on the Thursday preceding the weekend.
Home Again
May 3–5, 2013
Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s idea of home as where we start from and Thomas Wolfe’s warning that we cannot go home again, this weekend explores home as both a physical reality and an image in the internal world.
Participants consider how home is populated by people, experiences, and memories—both real and imagined—and how the world into which a person is born shapes thought, speech, action, and what is passed to later generations. Discussions explore the many meanings of home in both the analytic session and the writer’s space.
Coordinators: Sharon Alperovitz, M.S.W., and Evelyn Schreiber, Ph.D.
Guest Faculty
- Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D. is a clinical faculty member in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the author of books concerning child custody, family therapy, feminism, psychoanalysis, and intimacy.
- Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D. teaches at Rutgers University and is the author of works on psychoanalytic diagnosis, case formulation, and psychotherapy.
- Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Ph.D. is an associate professor of English at George Washington University and a co-chair of the New Directions Program. Her interdisciplinary scholarship examines subjectivity, race, trauma, and home.