The Mary S. Sigourney Award dinner has become a tradition since its beginning in 1990. The award, granted annually to distinguished contributors to the field of psychoanalysis for scholarly achievement, originality of thinking, and influence on the teaching or the practice of psychoanalysis, is presented at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, on the Friday evening of the Fall Meetings of the American. The ceremony is sponsored by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. The award, endowed through a charitable trust of the late Mary S. Sigourney, carries a cash prize of $20,000.
The most recent award dinner took place on December 19, 1997. The recipients for 1997 were Martin S. Bergmann and Mortimer Ostow (who shared an award), Lester Luborsky, Leonard Shengold, and Albert Solnit.
Bernard Pacella, a past president of The American, addressed the audience in his capacity of trustee of the Sigourney Award Trust. (The other trustee is James D. Devine.) Robert Glick, director of the Columbia center, and Burton Lerner, president of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine, also gave addresses. Lerner spoke of the merits of past and present Sigourney award winners and their love for their work, especially in a time in which we all wrestle with public resistance toward psychoanalysis, “in combat with pressures for a quick fix.”
The first award was presented to Albert Solnit, who was introduced by Peter Neubauer, a 1994 Sigourney winner. Neubauer observed that the audience was well aware of Solnit's achievements, having chosen him for many positions of leadership, including presidency of The American, vice presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and presidency of the Association of Child Psychoanalysis. For many years the principal editor of Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Solnit, in Neubauer's view, follows the direction initiated by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernest Kris. Neubauer mentioned Solnit's work at Yale University, at the Yale Study Center, and at government agencies, and his appointment as Commissioner of Mental Health for the state of Connecticut. In accepting the award, Solnit thanked principally his patients, referring in particular to a moving letter he received, 30 years after her treatment, from a woman he had seen when she was a nine-year-old girl.
Otto Kernberg, one of the first three Sigourney awardees and now president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, introduced Lester Luborsky. Kernberg traced Luborsky's academic career: a Ph.D. in psychology from Duke University in 1945 and psychoanalytic training at the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute in 1958. Luborsky has been Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychiatry at the University of Philadelphia since 1968. Kernberg mentioned Luborsky's extraordinary productivity; he has published 364 scientific papers. Since 1977 Luborsky has been involved in the study of narratives in psychoanalysis, attempting to objectify transference patterns. Luborsky, in his acceptance speech, cited the exceptional training he received in Topeka in exchange for working in research. He described how the field was dominated by the unnecessary idea of a dichotomy between clinical analysis and empirical research.
Mortimer Ostow and Martin S. Bergmann shared an award. Harold Blum, another early Sigourney Award recipient, introduced Bergmann. Blum emphasized the scope of Bergmann's capacity as teacher, citing three of his seminal books.
Generations of the Holocaust, with Milton Jucovy and Judith Kestenberg, follows children of survivors, examines the effect of the holocaust on children of the perpetrators, and explores countertransference problems in the treatment of these patients. In the Shadow of Moloch continues Bergmann's lifelong interest in Holocaust issues and explores the importance of aggression and hatred in the ambivalence of parents toward their children and the reciprocal aggression of children toward parents. The idea of child sacrifice is elaborated in many areas of conflict and cultural expression. In The Anatomy of Loving, Bergmann traces the origins of love to the symbiotic phase of infant development, asserting that to love, infants must have the experience of being loved.
On a much lighter note, Blum referred to Bergmann's role as a movie star, as the wise guru in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Bergmann's acceptance speech traced the development of his interest in psychoanalysis to the influence of Bernfeld. When quite young, Bergmann was asked by Bernfeld to collaborate on a work on Hitler. He was fascinated by the idea that a person's psychopathology — Bernfeld connected Hitler's syphilophobia to his anti-Semitism, that is to his view of Jews as “vermin” — could determine his political views and actions. Eventually this began his writings on the Holocaust.
Eleanor Galenson introduced Mortimer Ostow as an innovator and pioneer in combining psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological therapy, once considered “a mortal sin” by many psychoanalysts. She mentioned his work for the Jewish community and his more than 150 articles and 11 books, particularly Myth and Madness and The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism. Ostow identified the main influences on his psychoanalytic development
Irene Cairo Chiarandini, M.D., is a graduate and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. She is a former associate editor of TAP and a current regional editor for North America of the Newsletter of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
as Kurt Eissler, Edith Jacobson, and Hermann Nunberg and described the breadth of his interests from physiological to philosophical.
The last awardee, Leonard Shengold, was introduced by Austin Silber, who has known Shengold since 1947, when they were classmates in medical school. Silber mentioned Shengold's service as vice president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, program chairman of the IPA congress in Montreal, and leader of the fall meetings of the Anna Freud Center. Among Shengold's books, Silver cited Halo in the Sky, Daddy, Don't You See I Am Buminp and Soul Murder. Accepting the award, Shengold referred to an earlier slip by a speaker who had referred to the “Sigourney Weaver Award,” suggesting that the Mary S. Sigourney award is the “Oscar” of psychoanalysis in America.