Nancy J. Chodorow received the National Woman Psychoanalytic Scholar Award and Jeanine Vivona was awarded the 2006 Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Prize at the Denver APsaA meetings.
The National Woman Psychoanalytic Scholar Award provides institutes the opportunity to meet with well-known women psychoanalysts, often women who have made a contribution to psychoanalytic understanding of women. As part of her responsibilities and opportunities as this year's scholar, Chodorow traveled to the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute especially to be available to its large classes of candidates. She attended classes, consulted with a candidate, and delivered the Scharf Memorial Lecture on “Uncertainty and Loss: Two Inevitable Concomitants of Psychoanalysis,” “about the challenges to narcissism and of depression of knowing and not-knowing, and of the limitations to change, that face both patient and analyst.” It was a “wonderful” experience, she said, “a way for me to meet many candidates, as well as faculty, and for them to get to know me.” Sunday morning, Donald Moss, a psychoanalyst at NYUPI, interviewed her for an online journal published by candidates of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. Many candidates attended the hour-long interview discussion.
Asked about her choice not to talk about gender and sexuality, her well-known areas of expertise, Chodorow responded that it was an opportunity to encourage candidates, to deliver the message that “women can think about high theory and about comparative theory and technique.”
The award was presented in recognition of Chodorow's “distinguished career and contributions as an educator, theorist, author, psychoanalyst, and advocate for women. She is especially recognized for her invaluable and continuing work on feminist theory from a psychoanalytic perspective, with a focus on sociocultural and psychodynamic understanding of gender. Her scholarly and clinical works have inspired women analysts and others to incorporate psychoanalytic understanding in their professional and personal lives.”
Chodorow, who is in full-time private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work was interdisciplinary, crossing psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, and feminism. She completed her psychoanalytic training in 1993 at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Upon accepting the award, she acknowledged how privileged she felt to have had such a diverse career and to have been so welcomed by the psychoanalytic profession and community.
Vivona was awarded the JAPA prize for her paper, “From Developmental Metaphor to Developmental Model: The Shrinking Role of Language in the Talking Cure.” It is the first time the prize has been awarded to an author who is not a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Vivona contends “that if our enchantment with new ideas regarding the ubiquity and uniqueness of nonverbal experiences in the clinical situation blinds us to the potentials of the spoken conversation that is psychoanalytic treatment, then we accept, perhaps without even realizing it, a shrinking role for language in our psychoanalytic talking cure.” She says her interests focus on relational influences on identity development and their implications for psychotherapy process.
Vivona is an associate professor of psychology at the College of New Jersey, where she teaches undergraduate courses, including, wherever possible “an accurate and enthusiastic view of psychoanalysis that is well-received by students.” She says that a favorite course is a writing-intensive study group on psychoanalytic views of mothering.
Although not an analyst, she writes, “I received an excellent and inspiring psychoanalytic education during my internship and post-doctoral years at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.”
Vivona, in accepting the award, wrote, “I struggle to articulate my feelings about being selected to receive this most auspicious award: my jubilation, my amazement, and my gratitude. How fitting, given the topic of my paper honored today.”
Michael Slevin is editor of TAP.