In Their Own Words
Like so many organizations, we were challenged to explore new ways to celebrate honorees during the pandemic. In 2020 our winners collaborated with us to produce short videos to share their award-winning work with a broader audience and it has now become an annual tradition.
Videos highlighting The Sigourney Award recipients work showcase how psychoanalysis and the application of psychoanalytic principles across disciplines can transform the human experience for the better. Our hope is to inspire conversations in the world of psychoanalysis and beyond, while enhancing the impact winners’ work may have within communities around the world.
Click the videos below for a glimpse into work that is making a difference.
2023
In 2023, the award-winning work synthesized psychoanalysis with other disciplines and sought to mitigate human suffering based on sexual and gender identity, race, or religion, and oppression by authoritarian regimes.
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Professor Vittorio Lingiardi’s pioneering work has made a significant impact by bridging the gap between the richness and complexity of psychoanalytical clinical practice and the need for empirical soundness focusing on LGBTQ+ issues.
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Professor Rosine Perelberg’s outstanding work merges psychoanalysis and social anthropology expertise to expose construction of the feminine, the intricacies of sexuality in psychoanalysis, and the holocaust as representative of the murder of the dead father.
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Professor Daniel Pick’s interdisciplinary work investigated how the synthesis of psychoanalytic and fresh historical perspectives can help us explore the past and enrich our understanding of modern political challenges and the hidden influences that affect culture.
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Dr. Virginia Ungar’s leading-edge work in “the feminine,” child, adolescent, and women’s psychoanalysis helped change psychoanalytic curriculum and leadership and has significantly impacted the education of analysts throughout the world.
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El trabajo de vanguardia de la Dra. Virginia Ungar en "lo femenino", el psicoanálisis de niños, adolescentes y mujeres ayudó a cambiar el currículo psicoanalítico y ha tenido un impacto significativo en la educación de analistas de todo el mundo.
2022
The award-winning work in 2022 represented sea changes in the understanding of psychoanalytic theory and clinical applications. This year’s topics span modern concepts and techniques, gender and sexuality, racial equity and social justice, youth mental health, and parent-child relationships.
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Dr. Civitarese’s work deciphers and transforms concepts to address society and culture’s modern psychoanalytic needs focusing on a new understanding of unconscious processes of the mind, therapeutic action, and the function of dreaming. His work extended Bion’s reformulation of the concept of “hallucinosis” in a way that deciphers and transforms this difficult Bionian concept into comprehensible psychoanalytic techniques.
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Dr. Drescher’s work in the areas of gender identity and sexual orientation has strived to change the international psychoanalytic communities’ historical, discriminatory approaches and attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community. Learn how his work has increased acceptance and integration of LGBTQ+ psychoanalysts and helped reduce harm psychoanalysis has had on LGBTQ+ and trans-gender patients.
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Dr. Holmes’ groundbreaking psychoanalytic work has strived to bend the arc of psychoanalysis toward racial equity and social justice. Citing professional influences and experiences that contributed to her work focused on race as an identity marker that is commonly subjected to oppression, Dr. Holmes shares her work’s impact on psychoanalytic institutions, trainees, analysts, and patients.
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Professor Lemma’s inventive work addresses contemporary issues affecting youth mental health, such as body modifications, transgender identities, and the impact of new digital technologies on the mind and body. She shares that Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy, a brief psychoanalytic intervention for mood disorders, is making psychoanalytic intervention available (for free) for a diverse range of UK patients.
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Dr. Tronick’s seminal work focuses on non-verbal ways of relating and communicating using neurosomatic or psychobiological systems that are entirely outside of an individual’s awareness. Based on research with infants (who only have neurosomatic systems), parents, and analysts his work reveals that neurosomatic systems within the body can be affected or affect one another in ways that are distinct from both language and symbols and yet, impact individuals’ response to one another.
2021
Confronting Societal Problems to Alleviate Individual and Community Suffering
The Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy’s award-winning work focuses on access, education, and research. Advocating for access to mental healthcare, supporting of schools and communities, and conducting suicide research, education, and prevention only begins to describe their work.
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Traversing Traditions and Culture in China, Russia, and Beyond
Dr. David Scharff and Dr. Jill Savege Scharff’s award-winning work introduced couples and family therapy to families in China and Russia. Well in advance of Covid19, the Scharff’s delivered online curriculum to train prospective analysts and brought tele-analysis to people with little or no access to local resources.
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Connecting What the Analyst Hears and What the Dermatologist Sees
Dr. Jorge Claudio Ulnik’s award-winning work concentrates on unconscious factors that affect physical well-being, which is revealed on the skin. The work reaches across disciplines to forge a non-traditional psychoanalytic path between psychosomatic and psychodermatology.
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2019 & 2020
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. serves as Associated Faculty for the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor at University of Pennsylvania and co-founder/director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group. Originally from Argentina, her work with marginalized communities, began with Latinx and expanded to include gender and sexual variant people.
Anton Oscar Kris, M.D. (1934-2021) was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a psychoanalyst, a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a past Executive Director of The Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc. Within his work, he raised funds to gain freedom from copyright for Freud’s holographs for the public domain, ultimately publishing them on the Library of Congress website, exponentially expanding readership.
Helí Rafael Morales Ascencio, Ph.D., founder of the Social Foundation of Psychoanalysis in Mexico City, is also a founding member of two other psychoanalysis movements that include The Lacanian Analytical Network and the Psychoanalytic Letter Sculpture. The Social Foundation of Psychoanalysis’ analysts provide care for victims of sexual violence and relatives of the 177,884 missing women in Mexico while the Foundation’s psychoanalytic listening clinics receive people without financial resources or hurt by sexist violence. The work illustrates how intersecting psychotherapy and activism can help survivors of violence and their families. Click Here for Transcripts.
The South African Psychoanalytical Association (SAPA), a nonprofit organization, has dramatically increased the reach of psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalysis for people with histories of apartheid, racism, and trauma in South Africa. Notably, SAPA established the first psychoanalytic society accredited by the International Psychoanalytical Association on the African continent and helped deconstruct racist barriers within psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical training. Through clinical, applied, and community work, SAPA has enhanced access to psychoanalysis across all economic and demographic boundaries for South Africa’s people.
During a time in Norway when psychoanalysis was under great threat, Siri Gullestad’s work as a teacher, researcher, and public advocate was vital to preserving and ultimately growing the profession. A researcher, theoretician, educator, and a powerful public voice, Gullestad developed a highly innovative psychoanalytic theory that was applied to both university training and clinical treatment.
Dr. Henri Parens’ innovative research work focused on a psychoanalytic approach to the understanding and treatment of aggression. Working with caregiver/children dyads, Dr. Parens and his colleagues documented their hypothesis that caregivers could be taught optimal ways to handle the emergence of aggression in children and this approach could improve the children’s lives.
While serving as rector of the Instituto Universitario De Salud Mental de APdeBA (IUSAM), Dr. Rodolfo Moguillansky helped lead efforts to attain academic accreditation for the university’s psychoanalytic training program, built on the International Psychoanalytic Association’s tripartite training model. IUSAM is the only accredited university-based program that combines clinical supervision, academic coursework, and personal analysis. Click Here for Transcripts.
Imagine sitting across from a person who represents violence that changed your family’s collective experience. A not-for-profit charity organization, Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA) has developed and applied a unique approach to working with traumatized groups, national and international. PCCA’s method represents a novel amalgamation of psychoanalytic insights with group relations concepts and structure.