The American conferred honorary membership upon Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, Alexander Mitscherlich, and David Shakow at the Baltimore meeting.
Since the founding of the Association in 1911, only ten such honors have been awarded, and only two of the recipients, Anna Freud and Helen Ross, are presently living. The Committee on Honorary Membership felt this award has been “insufficiently employed,” and should be given to non-members who have made outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis, but who are not members of the Association. In addition, the Committee recommended that outstanding members of the American should be honored in other ways.
The following are brief sketches of professional contributions of our three new members. These are summaries from the Report of the Honorary Membership presented to the Executive Council on May 6, 1976.
Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, 85, is among the most respected members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Her dedication to psychoanalysis as a student, clinician, teacher, training analyst, and researcher spans fifty years. She was analyzed by Sigmund Freud in the 1920's, and her analytic relationship with Freud continued until his death. She has been a leader in the field of child analysis, was co-director with Miss Freud of the Hampstead War Nursery, and with her co-authored “Infants without Families,” a pioneering work in the field. In addition, she initiated the work on the Hampstead Clinic's Psychoanalytic Index. She is also well known for her special interest in the analytic understanding of blind children.
Alexander Mitscherlich, a native of Munich, is the founder and director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. At 68, he is professor emeritus in psychology and social psychology at Frankfurt University. An early, courageous opponent of the Nazi movement, Dr. Mitscherlich headed the German Commission dealing with medical crimes at the Nurenberg trials. His extensive treatise, “Disease and Conflict,” focuses on the central position of fantasy at a pivotal point between the drive-laden individual and his given social environment. He has received many awards, including the Goethe Peace Prize. Dr. Mitscherlich collaborated with his wife, Margarete, on “The Inability to Mourn,” a work which analyzed the reaction of the German people to defeat and to personal guilt. Perhaps his most significant contribution to the cause of civilization is the experiment of applying the analytic principle of individual cure through personal growth to the therapeutic transformation of a whole population. A man with a deep sense of responsibility and a creative capacity for independent thought, Dr. Mitscherlich has been instrumental in reawakening psychoanalysis in postwar Germany as well as in other parts of Central Europe.
David Shakow, a leading figure in clinical psychology at age 75, is internationally recognized for his outstanding studies of schizophrenia. He is also recognized for his contributions to the development of an integrated view of psychology, especially of the human condition in states of normality and pathology. Dr. Shakow was instrumental in shaping the course, mode, and style of research on the psychological aspects of mental health and mental illness for at least a full generation. His prolific clinical and research experience has produced over one hundred scientific papers and several books. He has been on the editorial boards of eleven scientific journals, and his dozen honorary awards include a number from the National Institute of Health, the Menninger Foundation, and the American Psychiatric Association. In addition, as an advocate of the psychoanalytic-psychodynamic viewpoint, he has been a central figure in influencing the academic psychological world concerning the value of psychoanalytic understanding.
—Ralph B. Little