Daniel Pick’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award - 2023
/Professor Daniel Pick Earns The Sigourney Award-2023 For Work Exploring How Psychoanalytical Thought Can Be Mobilized To Face Modern Political Challenges
Seattle, WA — Nov. 2, 2023 – The Sigourney Award is bestowed annually for outstanding work that advances psychoanalytic thought worldwide, honoring recipients with international recognition and a substantial cash prize. A prestigious panel of judges carefully reviewed applicants from across the globe and today, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD and Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust, announces that Daniel Pick, PhD, London, England is among the four recipients whose work earns The Sigourney Award-2023.
“Professor Pick’s interdisciplinary work skillfully intertwines history, humanities, and clinical psychoanalytic practice to shape new conversations that can benefit greater society. This fully supports Mary Sigourney’s mission to reward work that promotes the advantages of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thinking to improve the world around us,” said Deutsch.
Professor Daniel Pick’s engaging and interdisciplinary work has investigated how psychoanalytic thought has been mobilized to face some of the most dire political challenges of modern times. Drawing on clinical experience and humanities studies expertise, his projects have mapped the extent and impact of clinical involvement in wartime intelligence, debates on denazification and the Cold War, and the consolidation of post-war liberal democracy. Over the last decade, his work as an historian and a psychoanalyst generated new information and discussion about unconscious processes inside the mind, and at work between people. Moreover, it has illuminated how demagogues and other mind manipulators harness the passions of crowds (on the street and online).
In an era of political catastrophes, his research has helped underscore how psychoanalysis is shaped by history and can deepen interpretations of historical processes. Ranging across debates on fascism, brainwashing, totalitarianism, populism, groupthink, conspiracy theory, online radicalization, and advertising, Pick’s findings are communicated through non-traditional pathways encompassing film, books, radio documentaries, podcasts, and more. His work delves into unfamiliar sources and considers afresh the historical consequences of Freud’s “revolution in mind.”
His books explore ways that patients may at times feel themselves to be faced by a draconian superego authority or seek to exert powerful control over the mind of the analyst; and yet, his writings also show how profound psychic change can come about in the process. In Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control (2022) and The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (2012), he shows how a serious study of history can engage with psychoanalysis. Pick’s work is part of a wider endeavor by historians exploring, explaining, applying, and/or historically contextualizing psychoanalysis.
Recognized as a leader integrating history and psychoanalysis, Pick has received a senior investigator award from the Wellcome Trust for a team-based project between 2014 and 2021 on the history of brainwashing. In collaboration with others, he was also granted a public engagement award under the auspices of Birkbeck College, University of London. These grants totaling over one million pounds enabled Pick to conduct sustained research, collaborate with others, and facilitate doctoral students, post-docs, associated scholars, clinicians, documentary filmmakers, and others to inquire into and debate “hidden influence” in culture, commerce, and politics.
His projects help illuminate the value of Freudian thought for understanding group psychology in conditions of tyranny as well as liberty, and the risks of “wild analysis,” political misapplications, and commercial exploitations.
“I’ve always been interested in the applications of Freudian thought and historizing psychoanalysis. I have contemplated how ‘the talking cure’ was grounded in a particular history and have suggested how it can speak to contemporary dark times. Psychoanalysis is a resource not only for therapy and theorizing the mind but can also consider the passions unleashed in mass conflict, war, and other forms of human destructiveness. When looking at conflicts, in minds, or in societies psychoanalysis does not hold all the answers. However, it invites us to ask crucial questions about the role of unconscious processes, defenses, and phantasy and remains as relevant today as in Freud’s time,” says Pick.
Pick’s award-winning work is added to a long list of innovative contributions advancing psychoanalytic thought that, since 1990, have been honored with The Sigourney Award. This year, he shares this honor with Vittorio Lingiardi, MD (Rome, Italy); Rosine Perelberg, PhD (London, England); and Virginia Ungar, MD (Buenos Aires, Argentina), whose work also met the demanding Award criteria.