He received the Hayman Prize for best published work on traumatized children or adults by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) for his paper “On Traumatically Skewed Intersubjectivity.” This paper in press in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, considers how the impact of interpersonal violence experienced by parents during their childhood, resurfaces and shapes the infants development of intersubjectivity.
Schechter was also given his fourth Significant Contribution to Psychoanalytic Research Award, at the IPA Congress in Boston for his study “Distorted and Negative Attributions towards Child, Self and Primary Attachment Figure among Posttraumatically Stressed Mothers: What Changes with Clinician Assisted Videofeedback Exposure Sessions (CAVES).” He presented this paper at the meeting with Mark Solms as chair and discussant.
This paper reports a significant change in traumatized mothers' mental representations of their toddlers during the course of a brief psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapeutic intervention involving videofeedback with support and modeling of maternal mentalization particularly after exposing mothers to video excerpts of interactions that these mothers might otherwise avoid.
Schechter is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Geneva Faculty of Medicine in Switzerland where he currently resides.