When the American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Program was created in 1991, it was conceived as an outreach program to expose future educators, researchers, and writers in mental health disciplines to the intellectual excitement of psychoanalysis. A 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 15th year, the fellowship is showing impressive results. As an example of the program's impact on our organization, the two most recent winners of the prestigious CORST essay prize have been fellows—George Mashour and Kevin Groark. Mashour, an anesthesiologist, neuroscientist, and a 2004-2005 APsaA Fellow, won the 2005 CORST prize for his integrative essay, “Toward a General Theory of the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis and Anesthesiology.” Groark, an anthropologist, NIH research associate, and a 2006-2007 APsaA Fellow, won the 2006 CORST prize for his essay, “Placing the Self: Dreaming, Discourse, and Disavowed Volition among the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico.” These academics, coming from outside psychoanalysis and the mental health disciplines, are affiliated with APsaA because of the Fellowship Program.
Our fellows influence the organization in many ways. One impact, which may not be obvious, occurs within each year's cohort when the 17 fellows from across the country gather at the APsaA meetings in January and June. Over five days on each occasion, they meet intensively with one another, with members of the Fellowship Committee, and with outstanding psychoanalysts in our organization. Each fellowship cohort bonds closely, creating possibilities for personal, intellectual, and interdisciplinary interaction. The fellowship experience thus strongly influences networks of affiliation and cross-fer tilization both inside and outside APsaA.
The yearlong mentorship for each fellow (and for each fellowship applicant) provides an opportunity to deepen individual interests in psychoanalysis. Fellows attend the general program at each meeting, and participate as presenters in the Research Seminar; the Special Programs for Psychiatry Residents, Psychology and Social Work Students; various Discussion Groups; and elsewhere in the program. Including Groark's CORST lecture, Christopher Shinn's Special Symposium on his play Dying City, Jeffrey Murer's Research Seminar presentation, “Constructing the Enemy Other: Anxiety, Trauma, and Mourning in the Narratives of Political Conflict,” and the four Special Programs for Students, there were seven presentations by fellows at the January meetings this year. The fellows provide an important outreach function at the meetings by speaking to trainees, mental health and other professionals, academics, the press, and others interested in psychoanalysis.
Perhaps the greatest impact of the Fellowship Program exists beyond the framework of APsaA. Our Former Fellows have become educators, researchers, and leaders in the core mental health disciplines and in the academic world across the country.
The intellectual content of APsaA meetings has been influenced by these presentations, and by the many contributions of Former Fellows to the program. Caroline Rosenthal Gelman chaired a Discussion Group on “Bilingual Treatment” in January. Stephen H. Behnke co-chaired a Discussion Group on the “Ethical Implications of Candidate Analyses.” Ubaldo Leli co-chaired the Discussion Group on “Psychoanalysis and China.” Brenda Bauer and Anthony Bram, both Former Fellows, co-chaired the Special Event on “Case Formulation and Treatment Planning.” Other fellowship alumni who have made major impacts on the organization include Susan Vaughan (a founder of the Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues), Kim Leary (an active contributor to APsaA meetings), Sandra Walker (editor of the APsaA publication Forward), Jennifer Stuart and J. Stuart Ablon (members of the JAPA editorial board).
Fellows bring enhanced diversity to APsaA. They come from all regions of the country, including areas in which psychoanalytic training is not available. Their diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, and sexual orientation is greater than has been typical of our organization. Their presence at meetings has a direct impact on our community. And their intellectual contributions reflect the diversity of their experience.
Perhaps the greatest impact of the Fellowship Program exists beyond the framework of APsaA. Our Former Fellows have become educators, researchers, and leaders in the core mental health disciplines and in the academic world across the country. A prominent area of impact has been psychotherapy research.
Charles P. Fisher, M.D., is chair of the Fellowship Committee and a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
J. Stuart Ablon, an APsaA Fellow in 1999-2000, is director of the Psychotherapy Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. A nationally known researcher, he has contributed articles to JAPA, the Psychological Bulletin, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy Research, and many other journals.
Mark Hilsenroth, a 1997-1998 fellow, is associate professor of psychology at the Adelphi University Derner Institute. The author of an astonishing number of publications, his research interests include psychodynamically informed personality assessment, therapeutic alliance, psychotherapy process, and treatment outcomes.
Stephen H. Behnke (an APsaA Fellow in 1995-1996) is director of the American Psychological Association Ethics Office, and was a plenary speaker at the 2006 American Psychological Association convention on “Raising the Ethical Bar in Psychological Research.”
Caroline Rosenthal Gelman, an APsaA Fellow in 1998-1999, is a full-time faculty member at the New York University School of Social Work. She brings a psychoanalytic perspective to social work training. With a colleague from the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, she developed training videos which teach and demonstrate the use of contemporary psychoanalytic concepts in social work practice. Gelman says that the APsaA Fellowship helped her make contact with a larger world of psychoanalytic educators, researchers, and clinicians.
Esther Rashkin is professor of languages and literature at the University of Utah. A multi-talented individual, she teaches comparative literature and practices clinically as a social worker. She also studies interdisciplinary connections between mind and brain, and is currently organizing a research project on neuro-imaging at her university.
Sarah “Holly” Lisanby (APsaA Fellow in 1994-95) is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and chief of the Columbia Brain Stimulation and Neuromodulation Division. She has authored or co-authored over 150 articles, abstracts, chapters, books, reviews, and editorials. She became internationally recognized as a leader in the field of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) when her research team innovated the use of TMS as a treatment for major depression. In addition, in an important 2004 study, she and her colleagues used TMS to investigate the relationship between conscious self-representation (“autonoetic consciousness”) and the retrieval of memory of personally experienced events (“episodic memory”). Lisanby entered the Fellowship Program with the hope that she would find guidance on how to pursue her joint interests in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Through her APsaA Fellowship experience, she came to realize that to pursue her goal, she must first master basic neuroscience research techniques and then apply them to the questions that interested her. Now, after winning many international honors, she is succeeding in doing so.
Steven Schlozman, an APsaA Fellow in 1998-1999, is instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, lecturer in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and associate director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry for Harvard Medical School. About the fellowship, Schlozman reported, “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.”
These are only a few of the growing number of Former Fellows who are reaching out to the next generation of mental health trainees, undergraduate students, and networks of colleagues in their home institutions.