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Please join us in congratulating Rachel Karliner and Elise Geltman, the two winners of Psychoanalytic Dialogues’ 2025 Lewis Aron Prize for an original paper by an author who brings a new voice to psychoanalytic journals.
The prize jury considered twenty-three papers from an international mix of authors, each of whom was inspired by some aspect of Aron’s scholarship and vision for a just and inclusive psychoanalysis. Reading these papers was an honor and a gift. The wealth of voices and topics gave us great confidence in the future of psychoanalytic writing.
While we had originally intended to award the prize to one author, the jury admired Karliner’s and Geltman’s very different papers equally. When read together, each a winner in its own right, the two articles represent the breadth of Dialogues’ mission, the scope of Lew Aron’s work, and the wealth of material that we aim to present in the pages of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
Rachel Karliner’s paper, Meeting in the In-Between: Grief, Immobility and Transformation, impressed the jury for its originality as well as its creativity and use of metaphor. Taking George Saunders’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo as her muse, Karliner elaborates a creative frame to represent liminal spaces in treatment and enter the mind of a grieving parent. In a beautifully narrated and deeply moving case that brought Karliner and the father of a recently deceased infant into a shared scene of grief, Karliner joins the man in his psychic Bardo where the therapeutic dyad is suspended between unbearable loss and the imperative to continue engaging meaningfully in life.
The jury applauded Geltman’s observations in Who is Free to Free Associate: Psychoanalysis and Social Ethics for its originality, grit, and integrity. Geltman’s examination of her training Institute as a “case” was called “insightful, generative, and nonjudgmental.” All the while, Geltman’s frank self-examination allowed her to elaborate how a “trickle down” theo