When the American Psychoanalytic Association's Fellowship Program was created in 1991, it was conceived as a grand outreach program to expose future educators, researchers, and writers in mental health disciplines to the major ideas and intellectual excitement of psychoanalysis. A major goal of the fellowship was to educate a new generation of mental health professionals about psychoanalysis indirectly, by educating their future educators and leaders.
Now in its tenth year, the fellowship is showing impressive results. Although it was created originally as a program for psychiatry residents, the fellowship has expanded to include trainees and junior faculty in psychiatry, psychology, and social work. Most recently, the fellowship has ventured outside mental health disciplines to include academics and professionals in related fields, such as interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies and mental health law.
Each year, TAP publishes short biographical summaries of the APsaA fellows appointed for that year [see page 16]. Members of the association have remained acquainted with many of the former fellows who have become psychoanalytic candidates, who have graduated and become members of APsaA, or who have become regular contributors to psychoanalytic journals and APsaA meetings. They have enriched our intellectual discourse, our meetings, and our organization.
Less familiar, perhaps, may be former fellows who have fulfilled the mission of the fellowship by using their exposure to psychoanalysis to enrich their contributions to psychiatry, psychology, social work, and various academic fields outside formal psychoanalytic circles. They are sparking interest in psychoanalysis in the new generations of clinicians they are training. At the same time, they are generating interdisciplinary dialogue that promotes the intellectual vitality of psychoanalysis.
Sarah “Holly” Lisanby is a full-time biological psychiatry researcher at Columbia University, where she is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry. Since her fellowship year in 1994–95, Lisanby has received the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the Lilly Fellowship Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the Klerman Award of the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression, and numerous additional awards including travel fellowships and invited lectureships abroad.
A recent milestone for Lisanby was winning her first “RO1” NIMH grant, which establishes her as an independent principal investigator. This new status allows her to function as a senior scientist, designing her research much more independently. This enables her to begin to design new projects that combine her interests in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Using the new technology of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in which she has done pioneering work, Lisanby plans to study the concept of “self” in normal volunteers and inpatients with autism. Unlike advanced imaging techniques (such as PET scans), which simply reflect the degree of activity in various areas of the brain, TMS can temporarily stimulate or inhibit activity in specific regions.
Lisanby proposes to study individuals' verbal descriptions of their personal attributes in relation to activity in localized areas of the brain. For purposes of comparison, she will use the same individuals' descriptions of another person. In a separate study, she will explore in both autistic and normal individuals the process of recognizing one's own face. This work may lead into more advanced studies of the brain processes that occur during interactions between self and other and the processes involved in various states of consciousness.
While this research will help us understand more about the structure of the brain, it will also yield information about the sequence and organization of mental processes themselves. When interviewed for TAP, Lisanby affirmed that psychoanalytic hypotheses will be valuable in shaping her future lines of work, and her results may stimulate new questions for psychoanalytic investigation.
Lisanby entered the Fellowship Program with the hope that she would find guidance on how to pursue her joint interests in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The fellowship proved to be an extremely important experience for her, starting with her interview for a research fellowship at Columbia. Steve Roose interviewed her in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. Through her APsaA fellowship experience, she came to realize that to pursue her goal, she had to first master basic neuroscience research techniques and then apply them to the questions that interested her. Since that time she has been involved, with David Olds and others, in a reading group on psychoanalysis and neuroscience affiliated with the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute. Having established herself as an independent neuroscience investigator, she is in a position to “loop back” to study the questions she had originally hoped to examine.
Stephen Behnke was an APsaA fellow in 1995–96. Currently he serves as director of the Ethics Office of the American Psychological Association. An APA publication states that he “may have one of the most prominent backgrounds in the United States in educating, training, and consulting with psychologists on ethics.” The APA hired him for its top ethics post in an effort to make education a higher priority for the Ethics Office, which had formerly emphasized adjudication.
Behnke received his J.D. from Yale Law School and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan. Since his APsaA fellowship, he has also been an instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, where he taught psychiatry residents, psychology interns, and social work students. In 1998–99, he was a faculty fellow for the Harvard University Program in Ethics and the
Charles P. Fisher, M.D., a member of the Fellowship Committee, is a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, an associate clinical professor at the University of California-San Francisco, and former director of psychiatry residency training at California Pacific Medical Center.
Professions, and in 1999–2000 was director of Harvard's Program in the Practice of Scientific Investigation, Division of Medical Ethics, specializing in research ethics.
Behnke has written a series of books on state mental health laws. Volumes on Massachusetts, California, and Florida have been published; New York is on the way. He has remained involved with the APsaA, co-leading a discussion group with Ernest Wallwork. In December 2001, Paulina Kernberg will be the discussant for the workshop, which will deal with confidentiality and children in high-profile cases. Behnke has also given ethics workshops at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, most recently in May 2001, when he focused on ethics and law as they relate to psychoanalytic practice.
He writes, “I had a wonderful experience in the Fellowship. …For me, the Fellowship engendered an enormously positive attitude toward the American Psychoanalytic Association. … Psychoanalytic ways of thinking have been a significant influence on my writing.” Psychoanalytic understandings have been central in his journal articles “Suicide, Contributory Negligence, and the Idea of Individual Autonomy” and “Responsibility in Cases of Multiple Personality Disorder.”
Steven Schlozman, an APsaA fellow in 1998–99, lectures on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is particularly interested in helping education and primary-care specialists become more comfortable with the complexities of childhood psychosocial problems and the developmental issues that accompany them. He also serves as medical consultant to the Harvard Program in After-School Education. At the medical school, he teaches child psychiatry and consults to the pediatric liver transplant service.
About the fellowship, Schlozman reports, I have no doubts that the Fellowship was a significant part of my development. I think watching many of the presentations at the national meetings, especially the ones discussing art or literature, convinced me that there is an active and dynamic intellectual forum for applying psychiatric ideas to all walks of life. I have a big interest in popular culture, and I have taken the momentum that began in the Fellowship to generate articles covering folks like Marilyn Manson and TV shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The extent to which the psychoanalytic community was eager to discuss these issues was wonderful and inspiring, and has helped in a big way to direct me.
In addition to writing about the use of popular culture in adolescent psychotherapy and in psychotherapy education for psychiatrists, Schlozman has written a number of book chapters, including “An Overview of the Psychotherapies” (with R. S. Abernethy) in Psychiatry and Board Preparation.
Caroline Rosenthal was an APsaA fellow in 1998–99. After teaching at Smith College's School for Social Work for a number of years, she now is an assistant professor of social work at New York University in a tenure track position. She is especially interested in ethical dilemmas in current social work practice and the use of psychodynamically informed treatment with Latino populations. In her current research, she is investigating measurements of the patient's internal representation of the therapist in cognitive therapy.
Rosenthal's move from Smith to NYU has meant a move to a much larger academic world. Further, she has moved to an environment in which psychodynamic clinical theory and practice may be greeted with skepticism. She has met this challenge in part by participating in the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, where she is an active member of a study group of academics who encourage the teaching of clinical and psychodynamic concepts in social work education. Rosenthal's APsaA fellowship helped her make contact with a larger world of psychoanalytic educators, researchers, and clinicians.
William Pinney, an APsaA fellow in 1997–98, is a training coordinator at the George Washington University Counseling Center in Washington, D.C., where he is responsible for running the APA-approved psychology internship and externship training programs. He is an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychology at George Washington and adjunct faculty in Georgetown University's Counseling and Psychiatric Service. One of his current teaching assignments is “A Developmental Approach to Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” at Georgetown.
Pinney credits his fellowship experience with contributing to his decision to enroll in the New Directions psychoanalytic writing program sponsored by the Washington Psychoanalytic Society.
Other former fellows are equally distinguished. Lucy Puryear, a 1995–96 fellow, is director of Undergraduate Medical Education in Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Baylor College of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry Women's Clinic. Edward Gamarra, a member of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Emory University, was an APsaA fellow for 2000–01, the first year in which academic fellows were appointed. Though his fellowship was recent, it has already had a powerful influence on his work: He is organizing an interdisciplinary conference.
Geoffrey Goodman, a fellow in 1995–96, is associate professor of psychology in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University. He teaches graduate courses, provides clinical supervision, and conducts grant-funded research on such topics as “Attachment Disorganization and Assaultive and Suicidal Behavior in Pre-pubertal Psychiatric Inpatients and Non-patients.” The fellowship introduced Goodman, he reports, “to likeminded people — my own age — who value psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis and want to have academic careers with a psychoanalytic orientation at the center.” Contact with other former fellows is helpful to him in “conducting psychoanalytic research in a sometimes hostile environment.”
Mark Hilsenroth, a 1997–98 fellow, taught for a number of years at the University of Arkansas. He is a nationally known and widely published psychotherapy researcher. He recently moved to the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University.
These APsaA former fellows have had major impacts on the intellectual life of the mental health disciplines — psychiatry, psychology, and social work — and of several academic fields. They have influenced training, administration, research, and writing in clinical and academic departments in every region of the country. Stimulated by an intensive year of exposure to psychoanalysis, they bring new intellectual vitality to psychoanalysis through the interdisciplinary ideas they generate. Similar outstanding contributions have been made by many other former fellows not mentioned in this article.