Jack Drescher’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award-2022
/Pioneering Work on Gender and Sexuality Earns American Jack Drescher, MD, The Sigourney Award-2022
Seattle, WA — Nov. 16, 2022 – Annually, The Sigourney Award bestows international recognition and a substantial cash prize for outstanding work that advances psychoanalytic thought worldwide. A prestigious panel of judges carefully reviewed applicants from across the globe and today, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD and Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust announces the winners of The Sigourney Award-2022. Dr. Jack Drescher’s landmark work in the areas of gender and sexuality receives the prize along with four additional, extraordinary recipients.
“Mary Sigourney established The Sigourney Award to recognize and promote exceptional work that advances psychoanalytic principles and their ability to better humankind. Dr. Drescher’s impactful work in the areas of gender and sexuality fulfills her vision by helping improve lives of individuals other than patients, and expertly translating the complexity of psychoanalytic thinking into jargon-free language accessible to a wider public audience,” says Dr. Deutsch.
Drescher’s pioneering work has brought innovation to psychoanalytic treatment and theory—specifically, major, critical re-thinking based on solid scientific evidence and what is actually known rather than outdated assumptions about gender and sexuality. His work has also demonstrated how cultural biases about human sexuality and gender are embedded in analytic theories. During the past decade Drescher has focused psychoanalytic theory and attention on harms done by efforts to change a person’s homosexual orientation and by de-pathologizing sexual orientation and gender identity.
“I’ve long devoted my professional efforts to help psychoanalysis (re)engage with gender and sexuality in the 21st century. I wish to thank the Mary Sigourney Trust judges for recognizing my work’s psychoanalytic perspective in acknowledging complexity, history, multi-determined motivations, contradiction and the role of anxiety in shaping beliefs about gender and sexuality,” says Drescher.
A Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Senior Psychoanalytic Consultant for Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Drescher’s scholarly work and media communications to the general public have had an international impact on changing both psychoanalytic attitudes and public policies towards gender and sexuality. A notable example is his contribution to the recent revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) that helped end decades of diagnostic pathologizing of sexual and gender identities.
His work has managed to shift psychoanalytic thinking about LGBTQ+ people and brought psychoanalytic sensibilities into conversations outside of psychoanalysis fostering a sea change in psychoanalytic organizations’ perspectives on gender and sexuality. His work has also contributed to actions in 20 U.S. states and nearly 30 countries to ban conversion therapies for LGBTQ+ people, and notably, his publications were cited by India’s supreme court in its decision to abolish laws criminalizing homosexuality.
Drescher served on the Honorary Scientific Committee of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-2)
and contributed to the chapters on gender and sexuality. In recent years, he has reached across the globe on these subjects through speaking engagements in Brazil, Chile, China, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, Iran, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Portugal. His scholarly works further teachings with translations into Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Finnish, and German.
He explains that Freud, and much of early psychoanalytic theorizing, conflated the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity. Much of that history involved claims of finding the “causes”— and sometimes purported cures—of homosexuality. Yet, the contemporary scientific position is that the “causes” of any sexual orientation or gender identity are unknown. Drawing upon that perspective, his work demonstrates how cultural biases about human sexuality and gender are embedded in analytic theories. He challenges clinicians to rethink the limits of what is possible to discover in analytic treatments. For example, analysts and analysands are not discovering what “causes” homosexuality or “gender identities” in their practices. They are instead co-constructing narratives based on the meanings of those concepts to the two participants.
“We have been astounded by the contributions made by our 2022 recipients. Their purposeful and impactful advancements for the field of psychoanalysis propel its positive impact and importance across the world and we celebrate their accomplishments and hope this recognition inspires others to exceed expectations to better the human condition,” says Barbara Sherland, J.D., Attorney Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust.
Drescher’s award-winning work is added to a long list of innovative contributions advancing psychoanalytic thought that, since 1990, have been honored with The Sigourney Award. This year, he shares this honor with Dr. Giuseppe Civitarese (Pavia, Italy), Dr. Dorothy Holmes (South Carolina, USA), Professor Alessandra Lemma (London, UK), and Dr. Edward Tronick (Massachusetts, USA), whose work also met the demanding Award criteria.