The American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship: A Unique Opportunity for Academics and Multidisciplinary Educators and Researchers

The Fellowship program sponsored by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) was begun in 1991 with the intent of nurturing an interest in psychoanalytic theory and practice among future leaders in psychiatry. In the years since the program's very successful beginnings, the applicant categories of psychologist, social worker, and, more recently, academic and multidisciplinary have been added. This has enabled future educators, researchers, and artists with a serious interest in the relations between psychoanalysis and their specific fields to benefit from this unique opportunity to learn more about the workings of the mind and, eventually, to disseminate this knowledge within their disciplines and broader communities. Among the seventeen fellows selected from across the country each year for this highly competitive award, academic and multidisciplinary fellows have come from the humanities, sciences, social sciences, law, journalism, and the fine arts, and have included historians, literary and film scholars, playwrights, poets, anthropologists, anesthesiologists, and neuroscientists.

The APsaA Fellowship is different from typical academic fellowships that provide release time from teaching or funding to pursue specific research projects. Instead, fellows attend APsaA's two yearly meetings (January and June), all expenses paid, where they are invited to present their research or artistic work in specially organized seminars and symposia in which distinguished psychoanalysts with expertise in their fields respond to their contributions. In recent years, academic and multidisciplinary fellows have presented on topics including the