APsaA's Fund for Psychoanalytic Research was established in 1976 and is dedicated to the support and nurturing of psychoanalytic investigative scholars and to the facilitation of a spirit of investigative inquiry based on psychoanalytic theory and principles of mental functioning. Below are summaries of the research projects to which the fund provided financial support in its recent grant round. For more information about the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research, please visit
Jessica Borelli, Ph.D., and David Sbarra, Ph.D., at the University of Arizona, are studying resilience in couples experiencing military deployment. Grounded in psychodynamic principles, the research will investigate resilience in military personnel and their spouses and marital relationships before, during, after, and three months after one spouse has been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. The work combines the interests in marital resilience of an investigator with a sophisticated background and training in adult attachment interviews and reflective functioning and a co-investigator with longstanding work in attachment and in physiological measures. The measures include narratives of the non-deployed spouse and physiological measures, and symptoms and quality of life before, during, and after the deployment of one spouse. This work is potentially very significant beyond the important issue of deployment because the larger issues concern understanding the stability and well-being of intimate relationships. We are proud that APsaA is able to support this conceptually and clinically promising research work and anticipate that our help will provide grounding for the researchers to successfully obtain research funds from other sources in the future.
Saralea Chazan, Ph.D., in private practice, working with the Pacella Parent-Child Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, will carry out a project to standardize training in work with the Children's Developmental Play Instrument (CDPI): Pacella Adaptation for Toddlers and Preschool Adaptation. Working with existing videos of parent-child play, the investigators will formalize training in scoring scales for affective, cognitive, narrative, and developmental components of the play activity of mainstream children. From this work will come a DVD and new manual to train raters interested in using this scale. Several groups are already using the CDPI and several groups have expressed an interest in using the measure, designed to provide a common measure across various observation sites. Chazan is a psychotherapist associate of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a research associate at the Pacella Parent-Child Center. Support from APsaA will help to further this work which continues the legacy of important psychoanalytic work with children.
Sabrina Cherry, M.D., Columbia University and a faculty member at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, with Luke Hadge, Ph.D., Juliette Meyer, Ph.D., Lionel Wininger, B.A., and Nicole Yoskowitz, B.A., are following the career paths of analysts who have graduated from the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. They have found that half of graduates continue new four-times-per-week analytic cases and half do not. They are interviewing graduate analysts, and in this project are particularly interested in graduates who do not continue intensive analytic work even though they are motivated to do so. The researchers are also interested in how non-immersed analysts view their work and psychoanalysis. Support from APsaA will assist this research team to interview graduates each year and expand the number of graduates followed in this longitudinal work which the researchers anticipate will help institutes plan training and educational programs.
Rosemary Cogan, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.
Linda C. Mayes, M.D., is Arnold Gesell Professor Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology, Yale Child Study Center; special advisor to the dean, Yale University School of Medicine; and on the Anna Freud Centre's directorial team.
Ken Levy, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, John Clarkin, Ph.D., Cornell University Medical College Institute and Research Faculty, Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute, and Kevin Meehan, Ph.D., Long Island University, are following-up patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) after treatment in a randomized clinical trial with supportive psychotherapy, transference-focused therapy, or dialectical behavior therapy. The initial work found that patients in transference-focused psychotherapy showed significant changes in reflective functioning, which did not change in patients in the other two groups. The researchers intend to follow-up the patients eight years after having completed treatment. They hypothesize that social cognitive measures (including reflective function and coherence of mind) may be the mechanisms central to change in the treatment of patients with BPD. The researchers will use work resulting from APsaA support to help gain external research funds from other sources.
Trevor Olson, Ph.D., is working at the FIT for Active Living Program in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The research here is a study of the effects of defense mechanism interpretations in an ongoing randomized control trial comparing the effects of psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, and supportive clinical management. From existing transcripts of dynamic and relationship anecdote paradigm interviews before treatment began and at the end of treatment, and from therapy transcripts, the investigator will study the relationship between the accuracy of a defense interpretation and the patient's subsequent use of the defense in the session and the accuracy of defense interpretations and treatment outcome in each of the three treatment modalities. The investigator views this APsaA support as helping provide a platform for a research career by supporting time for intense research work with a very sophisticated existing research team that will enable him to move toward becoming a successful independent researcher in the near future.
Meghan Tiedemann-Fuller, Ph.D., is now in practice in Napa, California, and is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She plans to study the effects of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy treatment provided to community mental health patients with complex mental disorders including personality disorders and mixed Axis I and Axis II disorders. Patients seeking services at the Access Institute, which serves low-income and uninsured residents of San Francisco, will be recruited and followed during treatment with a variety of self-report, interview, and projective measures at the beginning of treatment and at one year or 50 sessions of treatment and, if possible, at one year after treatment has been completed. In this project, support from APsaA joins support from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in making this research program possible.
Dana A. Satir, M.A., a doctoral candidate at Boston University, has received support for the second year of an ongoing study of the treatment of eating disorders. Working with Heather Thompson-Brennar, Ph.D., she is testing responses to alliance-focused treatment for anorexia. The treatment focuses on the rigid defensive functioning and the interpersonal problems of people with anorexia and integrates two manualized treatments: supportive treatment with goals involving weight restriction and analytic treatment focused on transference and interpersonal dynamics in and outside of treatment. The intensive measures include self-report measures and interview measures coded for a full range of domains at intake, during treatment, and post-treatment assessments. At the end of the first year of the project, the work was well under way with the integrated treatment protocol manualized, several patients in treatment, and other patients scheduled to begin treatment.
Jane Tillman, Ph.D., is a staff psychologist, A. Jill Clemence, Ph.D., is a clinical research associate, and Jennifer Stevens, Ph.D., is a staff psychologist at Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The research here concerns states of mind in people who have recently survived near-lethal suicide attempts and are hospitalized at Austin Riggs Center. Participants will complete questionnaire data and structured interviews to reflect their current state of mind and their state of mind before the attempt. The two sets of materials and the responses will be compared with data from normative samples. The investigators anticipate that participants will be more impulsive and less resilient than normative data and will have lower affect tolerance and recall fewer reasons for living. The team hopes that APsaA support will help in understanding an important clinical and social problem.
Robert Ziegler, L.M.S.W., is a family consultant at the Harris School in Houston and a member of the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Society. He has been awarded funds to receive training at the Anna Freud Centre in administering the Child Attachment Interview (CAI). As part of his commitment on this grant, he will also write a proposal to work with the CAI at the Harris School. The investigator and the school personnel want to learn more about and study the attachment styles of children in their education and therapeutic program. The support from APsaA will help this committed developing scholar build a sound platform for future clinical and research work.
Editor's Note: This column has replaced Andrew Gerber's regular science column in this issue.