The American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Program is designed to bring mental health professionals in training or immediately post training, and also early career academics who are interested in psychoanalysis and applied psychoanalysis to APsaA to facilitate their exposure to our field. Seventeen individuals are selected each year from close to a hundred applicants. The biographies below of the Fellows for 2003-2004 describe a group with substantial achievement, scholarly activity, diversity of interests and backgrounds. We enthusiastically welcome them to APsaA.
Debra Anderson, M.S.W., Ph.D., is an assistant professor of social work at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Long interested in applying psychoanalysis at a macro level, she completed a doctoral dissertation in public administration entitled, “The Application of Psychoanalysis to Public Organizations: Method, Practice and Theory.” Since then, she has published articles about psychoanalysis and organizations in the journals, Free Associations, Administrative Theory and Praxis, and The American Review of Public Administration. Other research interests include organizational identity organizational change, and the teaching of social work. A founding board member of the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, she serves as the coordinator for continuing education. She also maintains a consulting practice, using psychoanalysis to work with non-profit and public organizations.
Dana Blue, M.S.W., is a doula and doula teacher for the Seattle Midwifery School and a psychotherapist in private practice. Blue spent more than a decade working in child welfare agencies, and in 1996 was named Pediatric Pulmonary Fellow in Social Work at Children's Hospital and Medical Center She is a founding member and past president of the Pacific Association for Labor Support, and founding member and longtime education committee member of Doulas of North America (DONA); as such she has had the opportunity to help shape the ethics and standards of practice for this emerging profession. Her work has been informed by a study of British Object Relations. She credits being present for the labor, birth, and early postpartum life of many new families with a growing ability to tolerate and learn from intense affective states, and her writing and teaching reflect this understanding of primitive emotional development.
Rebecca Brendel, M.D., J.D., is a graduate of Yale College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy She earned her medical and law degrees from the University of Chicago. She is a fourth-year resident in adult psychiatry at Massachusetts General and McLean Hospitals, where she is chief resident in consultation-liaison psychiatry. Her areas of interest include law and psychiatry, psychiatric ethics, human rights and psychodynamic psychiatry. She sits on ethics committees at Massachusetts General and McLean Hospitals and is the chair of the Human Rights Committee at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. She hopes to combine her broad interests in psychiatry and law in clinical practice and public policy roles, beginning with a fellowship in forensic psychiatry during the 2004–05 academic year.
Tiziano Colibazzi, M.D., received his medical degree from the Universita' Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome in 1999. He is currently a PGY3 psychiatry resident at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. He has special interests in philosophy molecular biology neuroscience, and transcultural studies. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow on an Intramural Research Training Award at the NIMH Division of Cellular and Molecular Regulation 2000-01. He is also studying Spanish to become more familiar with the Latino cultural world. His goals are to combine his interest in research with his passion for psychoanalysis in the context of validation studies and to advance a synthesis of the broad but unintegrated body of research knowledge pertinent to psychoanalysis.
Gabriele Dillmann, Ph.D., is assistant professor of German at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she teaches courses in German and Austrian literature as well as German language and culture. After studying philosophy and psychology in Heidelberg, Germany, she earned her doctorate in Germanic Languages at the University of California at Los Angeles with a dissertation on a self-psychological interpretation of the work of Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann. At the same time, she was also studying contemporary psychoanalytic theory with a special emphasis on Kohutian self-psychology. Dillmann's current literary interests are centered in the period of German Romanticism, but further include authors of later periods whose works illuminate and enhance our understanding of the human psyche and individual pathology. She is working on a book project that investigates the conjunction of narcissistic injury and suicide in literary works of the Romantic period and beyond.
Peter Freed, M.S., M.D., is co-chief resident in psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital—Cornell Payne Whitney Clinic. His interest in psychiatry, and the interface between neurobiology, culture, and individual psychology, began in college, where he spent several years teaching English and math to prison inmates. During medical school, he worked extensively with homeless families, and his experiences led him to become interested in correlating psychodynamic hypotheses with neurobiological findings. His senior project as a resident will be to develop a neuropsychoanalytic hypothesis of adult crying that could be tested empirically using fMRI. Freed was a recipient of the NIMH Outstanding Resident Award in 2002.
Adam Goldyne, M.D., is a fourth-year psychiatry resident at Columbia University. Goldyne completed medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. While a medical student, he helped integrate psychiatric services into a student-run homeless clinic. As a resident at Columbia, he has been very involved in medical student education. He created and now teaches a course which has become part of the third-year medical student psychiatry clerkship, entitled “Psychodynamics: Mind, Personality and Formulation.” The course focuses on the clinical utility of psychoanalytic understanding for managing patients in all medical specialties. In the past year, Goldyne has received the Arnold P. Gold Humanism in Medicine Teaching Award from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as the Association for Academic Psychiatry Fellowship. His clinical interests include psychotherapy, forensic psychiatry, and psychosomatic medicine.
Michael Groat, M.S., is a Clinical Psychology Fellow at the Capital District Psychiatric Center, Albany, New York, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Counseling Psychology at the University at Albany. Groat has helped rekindle psychoanalytic dialogue in the Albany region. As a doctoral student, he has taken a significant leadership role in working to create study groups, case conferences, and presentations on psychoanalytic topics in the Albany area. Using cross-cultural migration theory as a guide for understanding adaptation to cultural change, Groat's dissertation addresses the shifts in identity that upwardly socially mobile individuals face as they move from one socioeconomic “culture” to another His interest in the intersection of psychoanalysis and socioeconomic cultural transition evolves from his own experience as a first-generation college student.
Simone Hoermann, Ph.D., is a psychologist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, where she conducts research on the effects of psychological assessments. Born and raised in Austria, she received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Innsbruck. A grant from that university enabled her to do a Visiting Fellowship at the Personality Disorders Institute of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. During this fellowship, Hoermann investigated health service utilization and attachment styles in individuals with personality disorders, and became interested in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy research. During her subsequent postdoctoral fellowship at the same institute, Hoermann was involved in a treatment study for borderline personality disorder, and, in this context, also investigated neurocognitive aspects of borderline pathology.
David Huang, M.D., is a graduate of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and is currently a PGY3 psychiatry resident at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. Originally interested in orthopedic surgery, Capt. Huang studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate at Harvard College. During medical school he became increasingly interested in the contributions of psychodynamic theory and clinical interventions to understanding patients and improving patient care. As a PGY2 resident, he presented a paper, “Psychodynamics in Medical Education: A Medical Student's Perspective,” to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry He looks forward to the study and practice of both child and adult psychiatry.
Meg Jay, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary dissertation—“A Feminist Object Relations and Empirical Analysis of Melancholy Gender: A Forty-Year Study of Adult Development in Women”—uses Chodorow's feminist object relations theory to add nuance to Butler's concept of melancholy gender, which was inspired by Freud's Mourning and Melancholia. Jay's object-related understanding of melancholy gender suggests that the relationship between gender and depression is moderated by attachment, and this relationship is examined empirically in a longitudinal study of women begun in 1958. Jay also conducts assessments and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children and adults, teaches undergraduate courses on women and gender, and participates in a study of psychoanalytic therapeutic process.
Madeleine Lansky, M.D., is a recent graduate of University of California, San Francisco/Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, where she completed both her general psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship. A long-standing interest in psychoanalysis has inspired Lansky to find bridges in her clinical work between somatic, psychiatric, and psychodynamic realms. She has served as a consultant to hospitals, medical practices, and schools regarding the management of psychiatric issues. She enjoys teaching practical, psychodynamically-informed interventions to professionals outside of the mental health care world. Lansky has research interests in intrapsychic responses to medical illness and in somatoform disorders as a projective process. She currently practices adult, child, and adolescent psychiatry in Berkeley, California. She also teaches medical students at UCSF and provides consultation to an agency specializing in psychotherapy for foster youth.
Birgit Möller, psychologist, is a visiting researcher in the Department of History at University California, Los Angeles. She is writing her dissertation, “Psychotherapy with Traumatized Refugee Children and Their Families,” in which she analyzes psychotherapeutic treatments in an outpatient clinic for refugee children at the University of Hamburg, where she is a research associate. Her dissertation is advised by the Sigmund-Freud-Institut Germany. Möller is the project manager of a psychotherapeutic project for traumatized children in Kosovo. She is also coordinator of the Network Southeast Europe, which promotes and supports psychodynamic child psychiatry and psychotherapy in Southeast European countries, where she has organized and directed several seminars. She has been spokesperson for the German Health Professional Network of Amnesty International, and is a member of the International Network for Interdisciplinary Research about the Impact of Trauma of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
Andrés Nader, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester. In 1999 he received his doctorate from Cornell University for a dissertation that analyzed, from a psychoanalytic perspective, poems written by inmates in the Nazi concentration camps. A book on the same topic is forthcoming under the title, Traumatic Verse. His interest in trauma studies developed from interviewing survivors of the Shoah in Berlin under the supervision of Dori Laub. His interest in psychoanalysis stems from growing up in a family of psychoanalysts in Argentina. He has published and presented on trauma, psychoanalysis, and poetry; on images of the enemy and homophobia after 9/11; and on the historical and political contexts of psychoanalysis.
Ann Schwartz, M.D., is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Her primary clinical responsibilities are as director of the Consultation-Liaison (C/L) Service at Grady Memorial Hospital. Her primary research interests are in trauma and PTSD. She presented her research data in a poster entitled, “Trauma in the Inner City: Prevalence and Group Treatment of an African- American Mental Health Community,” at the APsaA 2003 Winter Meeting. She has an interest in learning more about psychoanalytic approaches to the mind in order to bring a unique perspective to her clinical and research work and provide another way of understanding the role of trauma in personality and the mind.
Adam Spivack, M.D., is a staff psychiatrist at Yale University Health Services and an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine. Born and raised in New York City, Spivack received a bachelor's degree at Yale before completing medical school at the University of Rochester and psychiatry residency training at Yale. While in college and medical school, Spivack had a strong interest in AIDS activism. He received a public policy internship at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR) in Washington, D.C. Spivack is interested in residency training and medical student education. At Yale, he has participated in residency recruitment and served on the Graduate Education Committee and Medical Student Education Committee. Spivack has an interest in film, and is involved with Film Fest New Haven, New Haven's annual independent film festival.
William Wood, M.D., M.A., is a PGY-IV resident and the Massachusetts General Hospital administrative chief resident in the Massachusetts General/McLean Psychiatry Program. Prior to completing medical studies at the University of California, San Francisco, Wood worked as an economist at the World Bank and developed intervention programs for women with infants at risk for poor growth as a Fulbright Scholar in Chile. While at UCSF, he conducted research on screening of early childhood mental health problems. His current focus is exploring how psychoanalytic theory can inform the design of preventive mental health programs, public policy, and media campaigns to promote education about mental health. Wood is chair of the American Psychiatric Association Committee on Residents and Fellows and is a representative on the APA Board of Trustees. His passions include playing the bass, composing music, and learning Chinese.