Editors' Note

We are proud to announce the 2009 recipient of the annual Symonds Prize: Francisco J. Gonzalez, M.D., for “Moving Fragments.” Dr. Gonzalez is an Advanced Candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Past President of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, he maintains a private practice in San Francisco in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and consultation.

Once again, we received many excellent submissions in this 3rd year of the competition, which is made possible by the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation. We chose Gonzalez's essay because it illuminates from a new angle the interdisciplinarity central to the mission of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. The papers we reviewed focused variously on a clinical dilemma or a theoretical refinement, a sociopolitical event or a cultural artifact. But “Moving Fragments” covers the waterfront. It reviews three films: Grizzly Man, Capturing the Friedmans, and Tarnation, each of which “wrestle[s] with the problem of madness through the construction of narrative.” Madness is plumbed by this graceful text and assessed for its multiple internal and external meanings, manifestations, and resonances; for the cultural representations it receives; its historical contexts; and its clinical significance as well.

Gonzalez puts us “at the intersection of the personal and the social, as the films themselves do in converting personal stories of madness into social documents that expand the shared containers for thinking.” Simultaneously, he holds the clinician in mind: “The desire to be a psychoanalyst,” he reminds us, “subsumes within it some interest in madness. … The healer gets close to the wound. Few of us are satisfied with a … treatment unless it begins to touch on some version of [what Bion called] the psychotic part of the personality.” Forthrightly, he articulates his clinical and moral stance: “Without the narrative of personal madness, we are left with Bollas's normotic—a personality