Siri Hustvedt’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award-2025

Work by Siri Hustvedt, PhD Wins The Sigourney Award-2025 for Fusing Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture to Advance Psychoanalysis’ Relevance

San Francisco, CA – Nov. 11, 2025 – Every year, The Sigourney Award bestows international recognition and a substantial cash prize honoring outstanding psychoanalytic work completed during the past 10 years. After a prestigious panel of judges reviewed work submitted from 11 countries across the globe, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD, Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust, announces Siri Hustvedt, PhD (New York, USA) as one of four recipients whose work is honored with The Sigourney Award-2025.

“A prolific and accomplished writer in many genres, Dr. Hustvedt has written poems, novels, essays, and scholarly articles of astonishing intellectual range. In each, she addresses questions of identity, gender, consciousness, and perception with a sensibility steeped in psychoanalytic insight and nuance,” says Dr. Deutsch.

Siri Hustvedt, PhD (New York, USA) 

Dr. Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary work mines rich seams in psychoanalysis, literature, and culture and has significantly advanced the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis in current intellectual and cultural discourse. An international author of both fiction and non-fiction, Hustvedt examines the intersections of psychoanalysis with art, philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, and the history of medicine.

Her work draws upon the insights of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Bion, and Solms. Rejecting the notion that psychoanalytic thinking is outdated or confined to the past, Hustvedt’s writings resonate with both practitioners and general audiences. She demonstrates the profound impact that psychoanalytic theory and practice continue to have on people’s lives today.

Hustvedt’s acclaimed works include A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and Memories of the Future: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2019). In Hustvedt’s recent paper, "Umbilical Phantoms" published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 103, no. 2, 2022, she regarded umbilical phantoms as part of a defensive amnesia about early bodily connectivity to the mother that haunts both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Through these books and numerous essays, Hustvedt continues to shape and expand the dialogue around psychoanalysis and its contemporary significance.

Beyond her publications, Hustvedt is lecturer in the Dewitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and teaches a monthly seminar in narrative psychiatry to residents. In addition, she has taught writing workshops for psychiatric patients at the Payne Whitney Clinic and later shared her learnings in an essay referencing Freud's literary versus scientific worries. Her lectures and workshops have introduced new ways of thinking about the practice of medicine and redefining the relationship between clinician and patient that has had a lasting effect on medical practice.

“Freud's scientific research interested me long before I began attending neuropsychoanalysis lectures in New York that helped me explore the complexity of objective/subjective perspectives,” says Hustvedt. “In my work, literature is a form of knowledge I link to the creative ‘between zone’ of psychoanalysis where insight can arrive suddenly, surprisingly, and surreptitiously. Memories of the Future, a novel as faux autobiography, is essentially a testament to liberation by therapeutic dialogue. My eleven years in therapy unleashed a new freedom in me, and I consider myself a walking advertisement for psychoanalytically-based psychotherapy. To paraphrase Freud, psychoanalysis freed me from patterns that hindered the fullness of my life; I was liberated.”

Hustvedt’s work was honored alongside the work of Dana Amir, PhD (Haifa, Israel); Calibán, Latin American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Montevideo, Uruguay); and ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action (New York, USA).

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