Erika Schmidt was a woman of many firsts: the first woman, the first social worker, the first child analyst, and the first non-MD to be elected president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute eighty-one years after its founding. She was also a leader of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), as a self-described “dissident voice within BoPS [APsA’s Board on Professional Standards]” and as Executive Committee Lead Director of the APsA board. She believed in progress for the field and that psychoanalysis could bring change to individuals, families, and communities, applying psychoanalysis in pursuit of social justice for children. In short, she helped inaugurate a new era for psychoanalysis as a whole. She died unexpectedly in late December 2022 at age seventy-three.