Five outstanding European analysts were honored at the sixth annual Mary S. Sigourney Awards dinner. Joseph Sandler and Betty Joseph of Great Britain and Jean Laplanche, André Green, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel of France were the 1995 recipients of the awards, which were presented on December 15 at New York's Waldorf Astoria. The awards carry with them a $20,000 prize.
The awards recognize individuals for original psychoanalytic work, scholarly achievement, contributions to psychoanalysis, education, and significant influence on analytic thought and practice. The award may also go to organizations for outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic education and research.
Joseph Sandler was introduced by Harold Blum, who cited his achievements: “Sandler is the immediate past president of the IPA, former Freud Professor at the University of London, and the Freud Professor at Hebrew University in Israel. He is former editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a most eminent author, editor, lecturer, teacher, and a compelling critic and discussant. From Safety to Superego demonstrated the breadth and depth of his thinking. The Background of Safety showed an interest in infant development which transcended considerations only of drive gratification and danger situations. Dr. Sandler has done numerous studies of basic psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, countertransference, resistance, and acting out, but has also engaged the controversial concept of projective identification. Sandler has both presented controversial ideas and helped explicate and clarify analytic controversies.”
Roy Schafer next described Betty Joseph as “a figure of worldwide renown. She is an (or the) acknowledged leader of contemporary developments in Kleinian analysis. She has contributed especially to understanding the fine interplay between transference and countertransference in the moment-to-moment shifts in analytic sessions, thereby enriching our understanding of the analytic process as a whole and facilitating work not only with the unusually difficult analysands she focuses on, but with all who enter analysis. Projective identification is very much the center of her thinking, and she uses it to extend the analyst's range of empathy with the analysand in his or her struggles to maintain psychic equilibrium. She is much prized as a lively, helpful, exciting teacher, in clinical workshops the participants finding that she breathes new life into all of their work.”
Paulina Kernberg, commenting on Jean Laplanche, praised him as “one of the most outstanding and creative theoreticians and scholars of the international psychoanalytic community. Dr. Laplanche perhaps is best known to the English-language psychoanalytic community by his classic text, written in collaboration with J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, the standard set of definitions and clarifications of Freud's basic concepts, and his equally classic texts Life and Death in Psychoanalysis and New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Laplanche has stimulated the French psychoanalytic community to reexamine basic Freudian concepts, and in the process has presented us with a profound clarification of the nature of Freud's thinking and linked this analysis with an entirely new approach to Freudian metapsychology.“
André Green was described by Helen Meyers as “one of the outstanding psychoanalytic theoreticians, educators, and clinicians of our time. He is one of the French analysts who are recognized as providing intellectual leadership to the psychoanalytic community of France, throughout Europe, and in all the regions of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His work has profoundly influenced contemporary psychoanalytic theory, particularly the understanding and treatment of severe personality disorders, psychosis, pathological narcissism, borderline conditions, the psychoanalytic theory of affect, and the application of psychoanalysis to the understanding of art. Dr. Green was director of the Paris Psychoanalytical Institute and president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, vice president of the IPA, and holder of the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London.”
Harold Blum also introduced Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, “a very renowned French psychoanalyst who has stimulated psychoanalytic thought by the vigor and vitality and remarkable fertility of her psychoanalytic discourse. She has been vice president of the IPA and president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society. She has been a most admired training analyst, supervisor, lecturer, researcher, with the unusual ability to bridge different analytic cultures and perspectives. She began to publish psychoanalytic papers almost immediately upon graduation from her psychoanalytic institute, and her book Female Sexuality was immediately acclaimed. Female Sexuality demonstrated her rejection of the concept of the little girl as a little man. Her work on the ego ideal may be associated with her high ideals, which led to her being a founding member of the Society for Human Rights.”
In 1989 Mary Sigourney of Carmel Valley, California, endowed a charitable trust to award the prize that carries her name. Sigourney was a psychotherapist with a degree in marital, family, and child counseling. Throughout her life she was deeply committed to psychoanalysis and was concerned about its future. She envisioned a perpetual prize, recognizing and honoring distinguished analytic contributors.
Each year the awards rotate geographically, moving in a three-year cycle among the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world (including Canada, Mexico, South America, Asia, and Africa). Last year's awards honored U.S. analysts Merton Gill, Peter Neubauer, Roy Schafer, and Leo Stone and two organizations — the Library of Congress and the Committee on Scientific Activities of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Bernard Pacella, former president of The American, and James Divine, Sigoumey's former lawyer, serve as cotrustees and appoint an independent panel of judges to select recipients. “The feeling throughout the analytic world,” Pacella commented after the ceremony, “has been enthusiastic agreement with the selection of these five recipients.”