Dana Amir’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award-2025
/Innovative Psychoanalytic Trauma Work by Dana Amir, PhD Earns International Recognition With The Sigourney Award-2025
San Francisco, CA – Nov. 11, 2025 -- The Sigourney Award annually bestows international distinction and a substantial cash prize honoring outstanding psychoanalytic work completed during the past decade. A prestigious panel of judges carefully reviewed applicants from 11 countries across the globe and today, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD, Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust announces Dana Amir, PhD (Haifa, Israel) as one of four international recipients whose work earned the notable recognition.
“The creativity, breadth, and quality of Professor Amir’s achievements as a clinician, teacher, supervisor, administrator, scholar, and Hebrew-language poet are matched only by the bravery and compassion of her interventions in the fields of contemporary trauma, testimony, and intervention,” says Dr. Deutsch.
Dana Amir, PhD (Haifa, Israel)
Professor Amir’s pioneering work has brought a novel and sophisticated perspective to the study of how trauma is conveyed in language. Her work portrays the traumatic lacuna as a melting pot of language that creates multiple forms of external and internal syntax. Her research delves into both perpetrators' and victims' testimonies, focusing on aspects such as word choice, tone, rhythm, and inflection. Through this approach, she encourages clinicians and patients alike to cultivate a poetic and lyrical sensitivity, one that focuses on the narrator rather than on the narrative, thus shedding light not on the factual story but on the unique way it is structured.
By mapping the interplay between dissociative and associative forces, Amir has identified new pathways for therapeutic intervention, demonstrating that language can serve simultaneously as a symptom of trauma and a vehicle for healing. This dual role of language is also reflected in her own poetic creations, which embody the dialectic between psychic pain and creativity. Amir’s insights on the language of revenge and forgiveness provided a framework for facilitating dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. In this way, her research has become a vital tool for both therapeutic and broader social interventions.
As a clinician, scholar, administrator, and published Hebrew-language poet, Amir has played a significant role in reinvigorating psychoanalytic thought within the Israeli academic community. In 2015 she established and continues to lead the interdisciplinary doctoral and postdoctoral track in psychoanalysis at Haifa University.
“My psychoanalytic work is deeply rooted in music and literature, and this means that what I am always looking for is not what people have in common but what sets them apart: the unique language in which they embody their deepest core,” says Amir. “Working with collective as well as individual trauma for many years taught me that, in the end, every abyss is unique, and therefore every way out is unique as well. It is based on what makes each one of us irreducible, irreplaceable. It is based on our lyrical core, or maybe the poet inside each of us.”
Amir’s work was awarded alongside Calibán, Latin American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Montevideo, Uruguay); Siri Hustvedt, PhD (New York, USA); and ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action (New York, USA).