The 2021 Sigourney Award

It is a great pleasure to announce that Dr David E. Scharff and Dr Jill Savege Scharff are recipients of the 2021 Sigourney Award. The Sigourney Trust, an independent nonprofit organisation established by Mary Sigourney in 1989, annually bestows the Award as international recognition and reward for outstanding work that advances psychoanalytic thinking and practice to benefit humankind. Ms Sigourney was a psychotherapist, publisher, and community activist who had a passionate interest in psychoanalysis and understood its ability to benefit and extend human conversation across various disciplines.

The announcement from the Sigourney Trust reads:

The Maryland-based partners' work adapts psychoanalytic thinking and practice for those far from a psychoanalytic center and educates analysts on how to provide remote treatment. Embracing teaching at the heart of their work, the Scharffs' remote teaching and treatment efforts were accomplished in large part through the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) they co-founded, and as Supervising Analysts at the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT at IPI) and Teaching Analysts at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

The citation goes on to read:

Long before the pandemic forced psychoanalytic clinicians to endorse remote learning and service delivery, the Scharffs' work employed videoconference technology in certificate programs that have reached psychoanalytically oriented trainees in the United States, China, Russia, and Latin America, with additional programming that enabled them to reach trainees and colleagues in such locations as Greece, Austria, South Africa, New Zealand, and Israel. Their books and articles have reached a worldwide audience through translations into Chinese, Russian, German, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish, while their contribution to the dissemination of free e-books in psychotherapy, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis expanded access to psychoanalytic literature for