The Sigourney Award-2024 Recipients Honored For Outstanding Work Advancing
Psychoanalytic Principles Globally.
Four Recipients’ Work From Israel, Sweden, Canada and South Africa Earns The Sigourney Award-2024
https://www.sigourneyaward.org
Recipients include:
Merav Roth, PhD (Tel Aviv, Israel)
Björn Salomonsson, MD (Stockholm, Sweden)
Dominique Scarfone, MD (Montreal, Canada)
The Ububele Educational and Psychotherapy Trust (Johannesburg, South Africa).
”The 2024 recipients’ work has uniquely and positively impacted populations, including the youngest among us, by expanding access and understanding of psychoanalysis as well as psychotherapy’s benefits to professionals and the general public,” says Dr. Deutsch. ”The anonymous judges, who likewise conduct exemplary professional careers, evaluated work from 10 countries to select work that most closely aligned with Mary Sigourney’s original intent.”
Founded by Mary Sigourney in 1989, The Sigourney Award was established to recognize and promote exceptional work that advances psychoanalytic principles and their ability to better humankind.
The exceptional bodies of work submitted in 2024 made the judges’ decisions particularly difficult. Accomplished in their own disciplines, our judges chose award-winning work from the past decade that has uniquely and positively impacted diverse populations, including the youngest among us, by expanding access and understanding of psychoanalysis. Spanning disciplines from the theoretical and academic to literature and art to social and political activism to culture and community, our recipients’ work has the power to inspire and expand the reach of psychoanalysis for years to come.”
Work by Björn Salomonsson MD Earns International Recognition With The Sigourney Award-2024
”Salomonsson’s work links classical psychoanalytic and attachment theory and infant research addressing distressed mothers and babies to earn The Sigourney Award-2024
The Sigourney Award annually bestows international recognition and a substantial cash prize for outstanding work completed within the past 10 years that advances psychoanalytic thought. A prestigious panel of judges carefully reviewed applicants from 10 countries across the globe and today, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD and Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust, announces Björn Salomonsson, MD and Assoc. Prof. (Stockholm, Sweden) as one of four international recipients presented the prestigious prize.
“Our founder Mary Sigourney sought to reward innovative work that bettered humankind. Dr. Salomonsson’s work has introduced psychoanalysts and non-psychoanalytic health care workers directly serving families to techniques that treat parent-infant dyads, creating decisive societal reverberations,” says Dr. Deutsch. ”
Björn Salomonsson, MD and Assoc. Prof. (Stockholm, Sweden)
”Dr. Björn Salomonsson’s work has significantly amplified psychoanalytic knowledge and infant caretaking techniques and engaged non-psychoanalytic healthcare professionals involved in pre-, peri-, and post-natal care of mothers and infants. Combining training in psychoanalysis and research, his work improves the early life of distressed babies by profoundly refining psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (PIP) methodology. His work pioneered psychoanalytic techniques working directly with child health nurses, whose exposure to psychoanalysis was minimal, to address perturbed infant-parent relationships. This creatively and respectfully introduced a psychoanalytic understanding of the infant’s and parents’ experience of troubled relationships.
Today, PIP, no longer a pale shadow of adult treatment, is viewed as highly relevant for every analyst. Salomonsson’s research contributions focus on the psychic life of young children in their formative years. Notably, he is able to convey his findings to professionals and lay people through videos and other tools in an empirically comprehensible way. Strengthening links between clinical practice and psychoanalytic theory, his work has provided detailed clinical vignettes and used video-recorded therapies to better explicate the clinical process. Moreover, he has evaluated therapies quantitatively and anchored the research academically. In his book Psychodynamic Interventions in Pregnancy and Infancy (2018), Salomonsson systematically describes how during psychoanalytic therapy actively engaging the infant, the therapist can practice therapies beyond the one-to-one and deliver a multi-relationship-based psychoanalytic therapy model. ”
“I am thrilled that my work earned The Sigourney Award. We know that mental health, in the infant and later in the child, teenager, and adult, is crucially linked to the parent’s well-being. By providing skilled therapeutic help to families through the parent-infant therapy I have developed, we can get to ‘the root of children’s future,’” says Dr. Salomonsson.
Salomonsson now teaches at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute on infant sexuality, developmental theories, parent-infant psychotherapy, and nonverbal communication. He co-founded The A Primo Foundation, with successful courses for nurses, midwives and psychologists in Maternity Units and Child Health Centers. Within the Swedish, European, and International psychoanalytic societies, he has been a regular presenter and panelist at the World Association for Infant Mental Health Congresses, the Anna Freud Centre London, and at perinatal mental health and child health and midwifery conferences and workshops.”
Quotes from https://www.sigourneyaward.org/newsandevents/2024/11/11/the-sigourney-award-2024-recipients-announced