Dominique Scarfone’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award – 2024
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Work by Dominique Scarfone MD Earns International Recognition With
The Sigourney Award-2024
Scarfone’s work advanced the study of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s work and generated essential theoretical contributions to earn The Sigourney Award-2024
Seattle, WA – Nov. 12, 2024 -- Annually, The Sigourney Award bestows international recognition and a substantial cash prize honoring outstanding psychoanalytic work completed during the past 10 years. 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 Dominique Scarfone, MD (Montreal, Canada) as one of four international recipients presented the prestigious prize.
“Professor Scarfone’s work has expanded the reach of psychoanalysis by elucidating the psychoanalytic thinking and principles from Sigmund Freud and Jean Laplanche, working to build bridges between French, British and North American psychoanalytic cultures. His work also addresses questions of transference and repetition in our relationship to art and ethics and is an exceptional example of what Mary Sigourney called a ‘benefit for humankind,’” says Dr. Deutsch.
Dominique Scarfone, MD (Montreal, Canada)
Professor Dominique Scarfone’s influential work has advanced a veritable renaissance in the study and transmission of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s work and produced essential theoretical contributions in unconscious communication, temporality, and translation. His work demonstrates how uniting tradition with radical thinking can expand the field of psychoanalysis.
Providing a new approach to Freudian thinking, Scarfone’s endeavors bridge French, British and North American psychoanalytic culture. Maintaining a solid belief that Freud’s foundational method offers a common ground between these cultures, he has urged persistent questioning and a reconsidering of Freud’s methods to evolve new thinking. Scarfone’s work has illuminated a modern path to understanding how the psychosexual enters the domains of transference and repetition, one’s relationship to art and ethics, and the deep complexity of what it means to be human.
His Freud and Laplanche scholarly work presents conceptual research and new ideas regarding the time dimension of psychic functioning. He has delivered distinct guidelines about the effects of psychoanalytic treatment, including the constitution of a real past instead of an ever present "unpast." Scarfone explained that Laplanche taught him how to turn the Freudian method upon Freud’s own writings to critically reassess them and thereby constantly refresh psychoanalytic thinking.
Scarfone’s efforts have generated new ideas about the psychoanalytic stance towards transference with the concept of “readiness,” or “availability,” and the inescapability of trauma in psychic life. Within the past ten years he has augmented his work, publishing three significant books including Laplanche (2014), The Unpast (2015), and The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche (2023). Further, his bi-weekly international seminar Penser avec Freud (Thinking with Freud) builds a better understanding of how Freud thought on a given topic.
“As an author deeply engaged in the development of psychoanalysis, receiving such a distinguished award is very gratifying. It tells me that there are organizations such as The Sigourney Award Trust who actively support the existence and development of psychoanalysis. This is of the utmost importance considering that our discipline, given the special nature of its subject matter, the unconscious, has to constantly struggle to assert its value,” says Scarfone.
Scarfone is a retired clinical psychoanalyst, a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (Montreal French Branches) and a former full professor at the Université de Montréal.
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