The Fund for Psychoanalytic Research has been an active component of The American for nineteen years. As chair of its board of directors for the last five years, I have been responsible for providing feedback to applicants and for reporting regularly to members of our association. Generous support of a research fund by a professional organization, through voluntary membership contributions, is an extraordinary phenomenon. During the time of this continuous support, we have received 184 applications, 78 of which (42.4 percent) were approved and funded. The total disbursed over the nearly two decades of the Fund's existence has surpassed a million dollars, having reached $1,069,014 last May.
Over the years, as we engaged in our rigorous review of the diverse applications received, we had the strong impression that the money we awarded was being used in highly productive ways, a fact in which our association could take great pride. With the Fund about to complete its second decade, it seems a propitious moment to consider carefully the outcome of our work to date.
This past year we constructed a questionnaire to be sent to former recipients. Through the exceptional devotion of my Boston staff and The American's Central Office, we were able to locate all living grantees, 98.7 percent of whom responded with information about their accomplishments, career trajectories, and how their work and lives had been influenced by the Fund. This very high rate of response is reassuring, with respect both to the loyalty of our grantees and to the validity of our results.
We asked several questions. What were the tangible products of the awards? What papers, presentations, books, and subsequent grants resulted from our modest support? Other queries addressed such broader issues as the effect of the grants on recipients' careers. We also asked our grantees to reflect on the meaning these funds had for them both at the time of support and in the years thereafter.
Turning first to tangible outcomes, we can now summarize two decades of contributions facilitated by our awards. It is important to recall that the Fund awards grants to scholars and investigators from several disciplines, including psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology, intellectual history, art history, philosophy, and English literature. The criteria for receiving an award are excellence of conceptualization and design, and clear relevance to psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline, as a theoretical perspective, and as an overarching theory intersecting with neighboring disciplines. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the range of products derived from Fund support is most impressive.
At least 302 articles and chapters by grantees have entered the literature, appearing either in major journals devoted to psychoanalysis, psychology, history, and other social sciences, or in collected volumes in those disciplines. With respect to book-length contributions, our energetic investigators have published over 32 works, on topics as diverse as psychotherapy research, infant development, psychoanalysis and history, psychoanalytic language, mechanisms of therapeutic action, and literary analysis. Two other types of tangible product are worthy of mention. First, one of our investigators reported that several audiovisual productions, including four videotapes focusing on parent-child interaction and aggression, had emerged from a project given seed money by the Fund. A second set of contributions is the successful development of psychometrically rigorous instruments for assessing, in ways replicable by other investigators, such psychoanalytic constructs and phenomena as the therapeutic alliance, therapeutic efficacy and related processes in psychotherapy, attachment representations of adolescents, specific language used in psychotherapy, psychological capacities relevant to psychotherapy, and evidence of object relationships emerging within the psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic situation. In total, sixteen such instruments have been added to the pool of trustworthy methods now available to investigators pursuing psychoanalytic research into intrapsychic and psychosocial processes.
Presentations to colleagues, both here and abroad, make up yet another category of products generated by our funding. Grant recipients reported much activity in this area, suggesting that the results of work we have funded have been widely disseminated. Countries in Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East were noted as areas where our investigators have presented their work, both to psychoanalytic colleagues and to workers in related fields. At least 326 academic or clinical presentations at national and international meetings were based on grants from the Fund, and many of these presentations were awarded prizes.
Finally, a key indicator of the success of small grants such as ours is their demonstrated effectiveness as seed money. In other words, did our grants lead to programmatic research that a modest fund such as ours could launch but not fully support? Here again, we found astounding success. Our awards helped investigators raise funds from numerous other sources: the National Institute of Mental Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the MacArthur Foundation, several smaller foundations, and universities. In total, 37 additional grants were received by our investigators, the overall dollar value of which greatly exceeds the total amount we have expended over the years. Not all grantees revealed their exact budgets, yet those who did reported that our initial grants had led to over twelve million dollars in subsequent funding, including support for a Center for the Study of Unconscious Processes. In addition to several grants in excess of a million dollars, other awards, ranging from $3,000 to $650,000, were reported. Clearly, our relatively small awards have been used successfully as seed money to leverage (by a twelvefold multiplier) additional support for our investigators' research.
This last statistic raises a further question: How have our awards influenced individuals' scholarly, research, and clinical careers? Recipients were most grateful and enthusiastic in their responses here, generating an excitement best conveyed in their own words.
“The original 1953 NIMH grant, rendering study of the infant Monica possible, was to be renewed every five years, virtually automatically, actually for twenty-five of the thirty years of the Institute's existence. Or so it seemed, until 1978… . The grant was approved, but with a priority score insufficient to ensure funding. The essence of the crisis confronting us in 1978 is evident… .You can surely sense how critical was the Fund's assuring the very survival of the project.
This was not seed money. This was literally life support.“
“Having received a grant from the Fund had a significant impact on my doctoral dissertation. The grant meant that I could hire transcribers and raters and cut down considerably on the laborious work of psychotherapy research. I found the process of applying delightfully uncomplicated compared to other granting agencies. The comments from the chair at the time…were also very helpful to me.”
“…these grants from the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research, though small in dollars, were large in telling me that our research, now turning toward prevention in mental health, was regarded as worthy and of value by a prestigious nucleus of our central organization… . The Fund's two votes of confidence in our work invigorated our conviction that prevention efforts must be made by psychoanalysis. The Fund cannot flag in its conviction that psychoanalysis must support its own research. Furthermore, it's great that psychoanalysis has its own Evaluation Committee to help researchers find their way to developing our own psychoanalytically relevant research methods.”
“The Fund has had a significant influence on my career. The Fund's support allowed me to conduct meaningful research for several years in the psychological sciences. One year ago I embarked on much more research, now in the field of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). I am now beginning fMRI studies to map brain activation during cognition—language, memory, emotions, etc. Many of these studies will be in conjunction with positron emission tomography and studies of cognition. Hopefully these studies will help our understanding of the neurobiology of cognitive processes in normal persons and patients, and … may be of help to psychoanalysis someday. And perhaps someday, I or others will be able to conduct studies oriented toward questions of more immediate psychoanalytic import… .”
“This grant was indeed instrumental in furthering my analytic career… . Most simply and directly, this grant was crucial to my continuing as an active and serious research scientist. It therefore also was essential to my being granted a waiver for full training by CORST. Ten years later, I am a graduate of my institute, a member of its faculty, and engaged in an active analytic practice… .”
“Indirectly, receiving the grant probably encouraged me to develop not just as a psychoanalytically oriented researcher, but also as a clinician. I have now graduated from my clinical training and have the twin satisfactions of seeing the extraordinarily rich complexity of human functioning on the couch and in the biography of Alberto Giacometti. The relationship between those two endeavors amazes me daily.”
“The members of the research team, in varying ways and in varying degrees, have been assisted in their psychoanalytic careers by participation in this study. One of our members has been appointed codirector of the Child and Family Research Center that has recently been established at the Menninger Clinic. Another member is a nationally and internationally known speaker who frequently addresses audiences on the results of our study. All of us have written papers and addressed scientific meetings on facets of our work… . I am personally quite appreciative of the contribution the Fund made to the support of our work.”
“… the Fund enabled me to conduct psychodynamically informed independent research for the first time, a positive experience that resulted in my decision to continue this avenue of research. More important, however, is the fact that a number of psychology graduate students, psychiatric residents, and psychoanalysts had the opportunity through their work on the grant to learn about psychoanalytic research. A number of psychology graduate students have chosen to do their theses on data collected for this study. Additionally, a number of residents chose to become involved in research because the focus was psychoanalytic. Further, some of the psychoanalysts who worked on the project became quite invested in pursuing psychoanalytically oriented research, something to which they had limited prior exposure. Thus, I believe that the funding for this project was the catalyst for a number of individuals learning about psychoanalytic research.”
“To my mind, another important outcome of this research program has been the training of another generation of mental health researchers. You may notice that many of my later articles list junior members of our research team as principal author. As they gained skill and experience, I encouraged them to take increasing responsibility for their studies. Several of my research assistants and associates now have academic positions at research universities and have applied successfully for their own grants. Perhaps also worth mentioning is that, as a result of this work [supported by the Fund], I was asked to serve several terms on Initial Review Groups (IRGs) of NIMH.”
“Because of his aim of pursuing training and a career in child development research, and his strong psychoanalytic orientation, D. joined our research group when he was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley… . His education has included both clinical and research training, with a major focus on research under the guidance of Mary Main [also supported by the Fund], … a leader in attachment theory research….He became our in-house expert on research methodology….The support he has received from the Fund, through our research group, has enabled him to sustain and advance his interest in psychoanalytic theory and in the research application of psychoanalytic concepts.”
“Two students who participated in the research have gone on to further their education in psychoanalysis. S.G. is finishing her dissertation at NYU, working with Leo Goldberger, and hopes to pursue a career in psychoanalytic research and practice. D.S. now has a practice in psychodynamic psychotherapy and has plans to enter psychoanalytic training in the near future. Both are very gifted…. the Fund grant was a godsend.”
“The grant from the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research allowed us to conduct a study which would have been difficult to fund in any other way. This work allowed me to study the narratives of panic disorder patients in a way that has continued to be deeply influential.”
“We had been (and still are) engaged in programmatic research on the therapeutic process, and the moneys supplied by the fund have functioned mainly as seed money for further programmatic research and publication. One of these grants enabled us to transcribe a large number of psychoanalytic sessions. These transcriptions formed the basis of further studies and allowed us to get another NIMH grant…. the Fund …, as one of the few avenues for empirical research in this field, plays a crucial role in the mental health community by furthering understanding about psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.”
“The support kindly afforded to me by the Fund is in fact influencing my further research. Understanding the relationship between infant, middle childhood, and adolescent attachment status has become especially vital in my sample, and I will be taking not only a statistical, but also a case study approach to understanding the development of these adolescents. This is new to me, and follows an analytic model. Further, I have become interested in the issue of narrative truth versus historic truth as it pertains to recent work in attachment…. Additionally, … I have designed a number of new measures to assist in our understanding of these young people….”
“Other studies currently under way or completed by other researchers using the Q-sort instrument include studies of the impact of sexual abuse on the object relations of both male and female survivors of abuse, and a study comparing object relations in the U.S. and Mexico… . the Fund has not only provided support for this particular researcher, but for a number of researchers internationally, who are using an instrument whose development the Fund supported.”
These comments, offered by men and women supported by the Fund over the past two decades, eloquently describe the truly major contribution to science, scholarship, and career development that the American Psychoanalytic Association has been quietly making for many years. The Fund is supporting excellence in psychoanalytic scholarship and research during an era in which support from other sources has dramatically diminished. I believe that The American's continued endorsement of the Fund will lead to even greater awareness by our colleagues and the general public of the multifaceted relevance of psychoanalytic knowledge and treatment. Our association can be deservedly proud of the profound success of the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research.