Rosemary Balsam, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University, has been selected to receive the Sigourney Award from the Mary Sigourney Award Trust. She is the first woman in the United States to receive the award, which honors outstanding work that advances psychoanalysis and extends its reach.
Dr. Balsam is honored for work on refocusing psychoanalytic theory on the female body. Her book, Women’s Body in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2012), explores questions of female biological awareness with particular emphasis on child bearing, sexual symbolism, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of gender. According to the committee, while the female body has been largely overlooked, Dr. Balsam showed that retracing its attributes is critical to our understanding of mental development. The totality of her work has now been recognized as constituting a major original psychoanalytic theory, the committee noted.
Dr. Balsam will receive the award at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress hosted by the Mary Sigourney Award Trust in London this July.
Dr. Balsam earned her medical degree at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.