Glen Gabbard, MD, 2000

Glen O. Gabbard, M.D. is Brown Foundation Chair of Psychoanalysis and Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. He is also Training and Supervising Analyst at the Houston/Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. He was the Director of the C. F. Menninger Memorial Hospital from 1989-1994 and the Bessie Walker Callaway Distinguished Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education at the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry from 1994-2001. Dr. Gabbard served as Joint Editor-in-Chief and Editor for North America of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis from 2001-2007. He was also Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association from 1994-2001.

Dr. Gabbard has authored or edited 23 books, including Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting, Boundaries and Boundaries in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Film, Psychiatry and the Cinema, Management of Countertransference in Borderline Patients, and The Psychology of the Sopranos. Along with Ethel Person and Arnold Cooper, Dr. Gabbard co-edited the American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Dr. Gabbard has also been active in writing psychiatric textbooks. Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice: Fourth Edition, an all-time best seller at American Psychiatric Publishing, has been translated into eight languages. Other books include Long-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Basic Text< and Gabbard’s Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders: Fourth Edition. Dr. Gabbard has published 300 papers and book chapters and has also written for Slate magazine.

In addition to the 2000 Sigourney Award, Dr. Gabbard has won the 2004 Adolf Meyer Award of the American Psychiatric Association, the 1994 Edward Strecker Award of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the 1997 Charles Burlingame Award of the Institute for Living, and the 2008 Harry Stack Sullivan Award of the Shepherd-Pratt Hospital. He lectures widely in Europe, South America, and Australia.

When I received the letter that I had won the 2000 Sigourney Award, I was dumbfounded.  I did not know that I had been nominated, and I had to read the letter over twice to make sure I had accurately understood its meaning.  I had just turned 50 years old, and I noted that the other winners were a generation older than I.  I had always thought that the Sigourney Award was the capstone of a long career, and I was extraordinarily honored to be selected at mid-career.  I had long labored to keep psychoanalytic thinking in the mainstream of psychiatry against overwhelming odds in an era where biological reductionism was holding sway.  To me, the Award was a message that what I had been working toward throughout my professional life had not gone unnoticed.  The Sigourney Award signified a commitment to the continuing growth of the psychoanalytic field.  It was a message that my work should continue, and that those of us dedicated to psychoanalytic work were the bearers of the flame in an age of darkness and inadequate, “quick-fix” solutions to complex problems.  It inspired me to continue what I was doing and to push myself further. – Glen Gabbard, M.D.