One of the most exciting events at the national meetings is the Friday morning meeting of members. Unfortunately, attendance at these official meetings is low, many meeting attendees perhaps assuming they are merely pro forma business meetings. Despite the name, attendance at these meetings is not restricted to members.
These sessions showcase the extraordinary recipients of the Association's prizes and awards. The stories behind the work of APsaA's honorary members, prize winners, and special award recipients are always inspiring, sometimes stunning, and definitely worth a jump start out of bed on Friday mornings.
One of APsA's highest awards is Honorary Membership. John Auerbach and Morris Eagle were this year's recipients.
Morris Eagle is professor at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University. He was recruited for the faculty of the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute because of his expert and comprehensive understanding of research and clinical theory and practice. He has played a major role in keeping open the bridge between psychology and psychoanalysis, according to the award citation.
In his acceptance remarks, Eagle praised psychoanalysis for the central place it gives to autonomy (in the sense of freedom of choice), self-reflection, and self-knowledge, what Eagle called the “enlightenment vision.”
New Honorary Member Morris Eagle.
New Honorary Member John Auerbach.
He feels that this vision has recently been replaced by the therapeutic primacy of relationship attunement and the corrective emotional experience. Eagle warns that something vital and distinctive in psychoanalysis is thereby in danger of being lost. Psychoanalysis must continue to embody the values of the enlightenment vision.
John Auerbach, also welcomed as an Honorary Member, is an extremely accomplished empirical researcher in psychoanalysis. One of his seminal contributions is a 1998 chapter on the origins of narcissism in Masling and Bornstein's Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, Vol. 4. He has also worked with Sydney Blatt at Yale to develop the Object Relations Inventory. This projective instrument collects information about the relationships between the self and the significant others. He is currently an associate professor at East Tennessee State University James H. Quillen College of Medicine, in Johnson City, and a pioneer in propagating psychoanalytic ideas and scholarship in the Appalachian region.
In his acceptance remarks, Auerbach said, “If there is one theory within psychology that takes seriously the complexities of human existence, psychoanalysis is it.” He emphasized his conviction that psychoanalysis needs a grounding in empirical research. He also made a plea for the inclusion of original text material (e.g., verbatim patient utterances) in psychoanalytic papers. Auerbach's major theoretical and research interest is founded in a Hegelian view of narcissism, which “holds that the self emerges only through relatedness to others—that the self is always caught between its wish, on the one hand, for omnipotence or narcissism, and its need, on the other hand, for recognition from others, for intersubjectivity.”
Two high awards were given to individuals who played a key role in one of APsaA's greatest crises. Joel I. Klein, Esq., Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, received the Presidential Award. Klein was honored for his wise legal counsel and unwavering determination to achieve a fair and honorable settlement of the psychologists' antitrust lawsuit against the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1985. As APsaA counsel, his skillful negotiations with all the parties led to a resolution that allowed the Association to reach out to many qualified non-medical analytic candidates. In his acceptance remarks, Klein stated that his goal was to help the Association avoid winning the battle and losing the war. He praised then-President Dick Simons who put the interests of the organization above personalities.
Simons received the organization's Distinguished Service Award for his extraordinary service as president during that critical period. Simons used his acceptance remarks to thank those who stood by and with him, the Executive Committee at the time (Shelly Orgel, Homer Curtis, Bernie Pacella, Austen Silber, Mike Allison, and Jay Katz), his wife Barbara, and the late Helen Fisher. He also stated that without Joel Klein's guidance and professional integrity, APsaA might not be in existence today.
Richard Simons, left, and Joel Klein received Distinguished Service Award and Presidential Award respectively for their work during the 1985 psychologists' suit against the association.
The Award for Excellence in Journalism was presented to Margaret Talbot, for her article in the June 2, 2003, New York Times Magazine, entitled “Hysteria, Hysteria.” The story discussed a series of outbreaks of mysterious skin rashes across the country following September 11. Talbot was thanked for her skill in communicating psychological ideas to the public and for telling a story in a way that inspires, engages, and engenders curiosity, awareness, and respect. Arnold Richards, completing 10 years as editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, received a Distinguished Contributor Award. Richards thanked the Association, stating “a journal is more than a collection of papers—it has been called a ‘thought community.’” He was proud of the journal's success at broadening its reach and diversity during his editorial tenure.
The Edith Sabshin Teaching Awards, a project of the Committee on Student Associates, are awarded annually to 10 outstanding educators for their contributions of teaching psychoanalysis to non-candidate students. This year's award winners were Ricardo Ainslie, Walter Todd Davison, Steven Engleberg, Robert Gillman (posthumous), Warren Goodman, Richard Gottlieb, Michael Hoit, Harold Kudler, Roger MacKinnon, and Gabriele Schwab.
Margaret Talbot, winner of the Award for Excellence in Journalism.
One of the organization's newer awards is the Children and Family Community Award, a prize coordinated by the Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis. The first recipient of this award, which is given to programs that provide direct service to children and families, use psychoanalytic developmental principles, utilize child psychoanalysis as part of a service mix, and have been established as a significant community resource, was awarded to the Allen Creek Preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The preschool's early childhood outreach program reaches over 600 families each year Every child analyst in Ann Arbor as well as many adult analysts and many analytically oriented mental health professionals have volunteered their time to work with families and at Allen Creek. Kerry Kelly Novick, the principal founder of the school and current Parent Programs director, accepted the award.
Three psychoanalytic papers were awarded special prizes. Laurie Case, a 2003 graduate of the San Francisco Institute, received the Karl A. Menninger Memorial Award, a prize offered for scientific papers by recent graduates, for her paper, “Metaphor and Emergence of Symbolic Capacities in the Psychoanalytic Encounter.” The CORST 2003 Essay Prize Winner in Psychoanalysis and Culture was the paper, “Psychoanalysis, Developmental Psychology and the Ideal of Reason in Constitutional Law,” by Anne C. Dailey Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. The 2003 Affiliate Council Scientific Paper Prize went to John M. Jererin for his paper, “Latency and the Capacity to Reflect on Mental States.”