The second annual Sigourney Awards—carrying cash prizes of $18,000 each this year—have been awarded to four leading psychoanalysts and the Sigmund Freud Archives.
The four individual winners: Drs. Charles Brenner, Hans Loewald, Leo Rangell, and Robert Wallerstein along with the Freud Archives Executive Director Harold Blum, will be honored at a dinner in Los Angeles on November 22 at the Bel-Air Hotel.
The Sigourney Awards co-trustee, Dr. Bernard Pacella, explains the criteria for selecting winners is based on their significant psychoanalytic contributions primarily over the past 10 years. “Not only publications,” says Dr. Pacella, “but their organizational activities and teaching. It's a mix of all their activities related to the field of psychoanalysis, including people they've inspired, the influence of their practice and thought that may relate to disciplines other than psychoanalysis.”
The Sigourney Awards themselves are a legacy of the late Mary S. Sigourney. She lived and worked in California and, according to Dr. Wallerstein who knew her, was a therapist herself while training and a persona several academic research programs, not only in psychoanalysis, but also in allied fields like anthropology and sociology, reports Dr. Pacella. “She understood the significant contributions and the lasting benefits from analysis and its enormous applicability to human affairs. She was concerned that establishment psychoanalysts were preserving ‘a closed system’ of training and practice with insufficient attention to applied psychoanalysis and research.”
Sigourney originally contacted Dr. Pacella, then Treasurer of the American, offering half a million dollars for psychoanalytic research, but then withdrew the proposal. Upon her death, Pacella says he was “surprised” to hear from her attorney, that she named her attorney James D. Devine Esquire and Dr. Pacella as co-trustee of the Mary S. Sigourney trust empowered to make awards up to $100,000 each year from the trust's income.
Dr. Pacella created a special process to determine award winners. Along with the co-trustees, there are three judges, all of whom remain anonymous not only to their peers but also to each other. If the judges' choices are unanimous, the trustees are bound to follow their decision. If there are differing opinions, the trustees can select a new panel to evaluate candidates for the awards or except the majority opinion.
This year's awards dinner will be co-chaired by Morton and Estelle Shane. Last year's awards dinner was held in New York under the auspices of Columbia University and honored individual winners: Drs. Jacob Arlow, Harold Blum, and Otto Kernburg; the organizational awards went to the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Society and the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute.
Next year contributors from Europe will be eligible and in following years potential recipients will be from Canada, Latin America and Asia.