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The Annual Presidential Award for Distinguished Service and Scientific Contributions was established by the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in 1990. The first recipients were Irving Bieber, M.D., Judd Marmor, M.D., and Alexandra Symonds, M.D. This year the Academy selected Roy R. Grinker, Sr., M.D., a charter member and The Academy's sixth president, to become the fourth award recipient. Unfortunately, Dr. Grinker died 2 weeks before the scheduled presentation. Thus, the award honoring a great man's lifetime achievement was accepted posthumously by his son, Roy R. Grinker, Jr., M.D.
This special section of the Journal offers the four papers presented that day, one by Roy R. Grinker, Jr., and three by esteemed friends and colleagues: Leon Salzman, M.D., Marianne H. Eckhardt, M.D., and Judd Marmor, M.D. as well as an original paper by Dr. Grinker Sr., which appears here for the first time.
Those present on that occasion will recall that although the session became a memorial ceremony, the mood was not somber. In fact, laughter filled the room as Roy Grinker, Jr. played an audiotape of his father's reminiscences of his analysis with Freud and other moving recollections of his life with father.
The presenters described Dr. Grinker's remarkable productivity, his clarity of thought, his dislike of dogma, and his efforts to bring psychoanalysis into the modern world, in part by helping to establish our Academy.
Dr. Marmor stated it well: “We are all diminished when a cherished person departs the scene, but it is a special kind of loss when one of the intellectual giants who has greatly enriched and enlarged our scientific purview passes on. Roy was such a giant.”
We shall all miss him.