ICSW Achievement Spotlight
We would like to share the recent accolades of some of our ICSW Faculty, Students and Alumni. These include awards, publications, events or honors that have been recognized in the community.
Renee Dickerson, Ph.D., LCPC, CADC
Bobbie Davis, Ph.D., LCSW, RPT-S
Bobbie M. Davis is a Clinical Social Work/Therapist , PhD, LCSW, and is an ICSW Alumni. Bobbie specializes in the counseling of Trauma and PTSD, Child or Adolescent, Sexual Abuse, etc. Bobbie recently gave two presentations at the beginning of this year and we would like to spotlight those here. You can find information about the events in the links below.
Sharon Berlin, Ph.D. Student
Current ICSW Ph.D. student, Sharon Berlin recently published an article with Dr. Molly Witten in the Psychoanalytic Social Work journal that deserves a spotlight. You can find a link to the publication below.
Edie Hitchcock, Ph.D., LCPC
The Lee Jaffe Candidates’ Council Paper Prize is a long-standing annual writing competition for APsA candidates, designed to support the development of new psychoanalytic writers. The 2025 prize winner is Dr. Edie Hitchcock for her paper, “The Excessive Polycule: Polyamory as an Expression of the Death Drive”. The paper examines the contemporary cultural practice of polyamory as it may arise in the consulting room, uses Kleinian and Lacanian conceptions of the death drive to illuminate work with a patient in a distressing polyamorous relationship. This paper examines how polyamory can represent a paradoxical attempt to subvert a hierarchical social order by re-presenting all relationships as lateral and can work via the death drive to disavow lack and ambivalence while both promising and promoting life-in-excess-of-life.
Dr. Renee Dickerson was named by The Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs (IDVA) and the USDVA Women’s Health Department as one of their 25 Illinois Women Veterans Leaders of 2025. These women were nominated for their exceptional leadership, contributions, and dedication to the women veteran community.
The honorees will be celebrated at a ceremony scheduled for March 31, 2025, at Malcolm X College in Chicago. The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and will include a program and light refreshments.
The recognition aims to highlight the significant impact these women have made within the veteran community and beyond.
Christina Peters, Ph.D.
ICSW faculty member, Christine Peters recently published an article titled “A Subjectivity of One's Own: Neuropsychological Differences and the Shaping of Experience!” You can find the abstract and a link to the publication below.
ABSTRACT
How we understand and experience ourselves, others, and the world is impacted by more than typically considered psychodynamic factors. Our neuropsychology additionally shapes how we attribute meanings to interpersonal experiences. This article integrates often overlooked neuropsychological factors with psychoanalytic perspectives by looking specifically at the role of sensorimotor and language systems in shaping relational dynamics and subjective meanings. Using a self psychological framework, this discussion expands our understanding of the selfobject experience by fine-tuning a consideration of what can be meaningfully used within interpersonal dynamics, similar to Winnicott’s concept of the capacity for object usage. Additionally, it adds relational and intersubjective perspectives to consider the interplay of mind-body-brain factors within the relational environment and the progressive, reciprocal nature of the co-created meanings, while also emphasizing the importance of looking outside psychoanalysis to build interdisciplinary bridges within psychoanalytic clinical thinking.