Björn Salomonsson’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award – 2024
/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
Seattle, WA – Nov. 12, 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.