Dr. Juan-Eduardo Tesone’s Work Wins The Sigourney Award-2026 for Translating Psychoanalytic Understanding of Child Sexual Abuse into Public Health Practice
San Francisco, CA – Nov. 10, 2026 – Work by Juan-Eduardo Tesone, MD, PhD (Buenos Aires, Argentina) is being recognized with The Sigourney Award-2026 for outstanding achievements that advance psychoanalytic thought and its application, according to Robin A. Deutsch, PhD, Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust. His work was one of four selected for the Award’s international recognition after an anonymous panel of distinguished judges reviewed a record number of applications from 23 countries.
“Dr. Tesone’s work makes a major contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of incest and childhood sexual trauma. Combined with his sustained educational and preventive impact across Latin America, it shows how psychoanalytic knowledge can move beyond the consulting room and become a force for lasting public benefit,” says Deutsch.
Dr. Juan-Eduardo Tesone, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has expanded psychoanalytic theory into a domain long kept at a distance: incest and child sexual abuse, which he calls “the unthinkable and unthought-about taboo.” While psychoanalysis has extensively theorized incestuous desire, Tesone engages with abuse as it actually occurs, distinguishing the seduction that helps form a child’s psyche from traumatic seduction, in which an adult’s sexuality intrudes destructively and erases the boundaries between generations. In Trauma: A Pain Without a Subject (Routledge, 2024), he offers a framework for understanding how sexual violence and psychological trauma may compromise psychic organization, symbolization, and the capacity to articulate suffering within a coherent sense of self.
“Despite the severity and rise in child sexual abuse—particularly online, which has grown exponentially—this issue has not been adequately addressed in psychoanalysis, either from a theoretical perspective or in terms of the implementation of public prevention policies,” says Tesone.
Tesone has also turned this understanding into protection for children. Inspired by Canada’s “Feeling Yes, Feeling No” program, he created and supervised through 2023 a child sexual abuse prevention program in the primary schools of San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, in partnership with local government and the city’s professional associations of psychologists and lawyers. Reaching children ages six to ten, along with their parents and teachers, the program was recognized by the Province of Tucumán as one of its most significant social initiatives. Tesone has further extended psychoanalytic care to the community by supervising SOS Brasil, a program through which psychoanalysts offer free treatment to low-income people suffering from trauma.
A Professor Emeritus at Buenos Aires’s Universidad del Salvador (USAL), Tesone has taught nearly 300 Latin American doctoral candidates in the doctoral program “The Disruptive and Psychoanalysis,” and has trained professionals for emergency work in disasters and catastrophes. His fictional short story collection, Impure Tales (2024), explores trauma, memory, and unconscious transmission across generations.
A training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and former member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, Tesone has been named a Knight of the National Order of Merit and a Knight of the Academic Palms by the French government for his contributions to child and adolescent mental health in France and Argentina.
“Dr. Tesone’s original contribution to psychoanalytic theory, and his use of psychoanalytic knowledge to benefit society, are a fitting example of our founder’s vision,” says Michael J. Harrington, JD, Attorney Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust.
The Sigourney Award Trust annually rewards achievements that advance psychoanalytic thought and principles worldwide with international recognition. Tesone’s work was honored alongside work by Salem Eid Al-Arjani, PhD (Gaza, Palestine); Paula Christian-Kliger, PhD, ABPP (New York, USA); and the University College London Psychoanalysis Unit (London, UK).
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