Jorge Canestri, MD, 2004 (1942 - 2021)

In addition to his Role as psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Jorge Canestri specializes in linguistics and epistemology. He is a training and supervising analyst for the Italian Psychoanalytic Association and for the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. He has served as Director of the ‘Institute of Psychoanalysis’ of the Italian Psychoanalytical Association, Chair of the Ethics Committee of the IPA, Chair of the Working Party on Theoretical Issues of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, Chair of the 42nd Congress of the IPA in Nice 2001, a Member of the Conceptual and Empirical Research Committee of the IPA, Professor of Psychology of Mental Health at the Univerita de Roma, and in numerous other positions. He is described as one of the most remarkable and renowned psychoanalysts in Italy. The list of numerous publications spanning more than thirty years is highly impressive. He is the co-author of The Babel of the Unconscious Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Pyschoanalytic Dimension and an Editor of Pluralism and Unity? Methods of research in psychoanalysis. He is also the Director of the webpage: Psychoanalysis and logical mathematical thought. Dr. Canestri is also a very active participant in many international scientific exchanges, presenting one of the main reports at the French-speaking conference held in Milan in 2003, and brings an epistemological perspective to the understanding of pluralistic developments in psychoanalysis. His interests have brought him to explore the fields of neurosciences, linguistics and epistemology in an attempt to create conceptual bridges with other disciplines without losing the tenants of psychoanalytical specificity.

Having received the Mary S. Sigourney Award in 2004 for my work as a psychoanalyst was a great honour and a great satisfaction. I am very grateful to the Mary S. Sigourney Award Trust for granting me with this prize. A recognition of this sort is surely an incentive to continue working and investigating into our discipline in order to transmit psychoanalysis to the generations to come. – Jorge Canestri, M.D.