Psychoanalytic Training InstituteThe Plumsock Prize was established in 1990 by the Society with a grant from the Plumsock Fund in Indianapolis. It is designed to encourage good writing on psychoanalytic subjects. Submissions are judged and the prize administered by a committee of members appointed by the Board of Directors.
Started by Edwin Fancher, a longtime CFS member (who, with Norman Mailer, started and published the Village Voice!), the Plumsock Award for both Candidates and new graduates has at its core the intention to encourage writing and the expression of psychoanalytic ideas by early career thinkers.
The New York /Contemporary Freudian Society has accrued a rich array of papers that bring together theoretical ideas with clinical practice. Each paper, with its unique focus, shows the author’s way of linking their clinical work with a specific facet of theory.
While incredibly diverse, one profound commonality is that the Plumsock winners each move psychoanalysis forward in development. Each paper was written at a certain moment in time, and each author, in close consideration of clinical process, expounds an area of psychoanalytic understanding, and then adds a new original layer of thinking that further enriches that area.
The Traditional Plumsock Prize is open to current candidates and to members who have graduated within the past five years.
The Senior Plumsock Prize is available to any member of the Society who has not previously had a paper accepted in a juried psychoanalytic publication.
Prizes of $1,000 will be awarded at graduation each year, accompanied by a plaque.
A number of Plumsock Prize-winning papers were included in a recent publication, entitled The Plumsock Papers: Giving New Analysts a Voice, edited by Paula Ellman and Kimberly Kleinman and published with IPBooks.
About the book, Daniel Benveniste, PhD wrote, “The Plumsock Papers are written by candidates and new graduates of the Institute of the Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) of New York. In publishing these creative papers, the CFS is passing the torch to the younger generation, ensuring the society’s own longevity as an institution, and contributing to the vitality of psychoanalysis itself. In this rich collection of Plumsock Papers we read the creative contributions of young analysts attending to contemporary issues such as the co-construction of analysis, on-line treatment, analytic work with Asperger’s Syndrome patients, the integration of different psychoanalytic theories, analytic work with older patients, and so much more. “
Traditional Plumsock Prize Winners
2016: Kerry Moore, PhD “Theatre of the Hole: Encounter and Its Psychic (K)nots”
2015: Marie A. Murphy, MSW “The Dilemma of Separation”
Roman Yumatov, MA “Bisexuality and Its Vicissitudes”
2012: Debra Neumann, PhD “Psychoanalysis in Cyberspace”
2009: Christian J. Churchill, PhD “Treating the Subject: Toward Common Ground in Psychoanalysis and Ethnography”
2006: Michael Krass, PhD “Fear and Loathing on the Couch: The Intersection of Managed Care and Masochism”
2003: Nancy Cromer-Grayson, CSW “The Opening and Closing of Doors: Chronic Syntonic Acting out”
2002: Geoff Goodman, PhD “Object Relations and Internal Working Models: A new Model for Understanding Their Structure and Function”
2001: Geoff Goodman, PhD “Mother’s Object Representations and Internal Working Models of Their Children: Experts on Each Construct Agree on their Conceptual Equivalence”
2000: Kerry Malawista, CSW “Conversion Symptoms and Psychoanalysis in a Second Language: Some Thoughts on Their Relationship in the Analysis of Mr. B.”
Andrea Hadge, PhD “A Report of an Unusual Case of Incest between a Mother and a Daughter”
1995: Stephanie Kiseluk, PhD “The Disenchantment of Freud: Construction in the Case of Emmy von N.”
**John Rosegrant, PhD “The Anal World of a Six-Year-Old Boy.”
1993: Shelley Rockwell, PhD “Reality and the Unconscious”
**Phillida B. Rosnick, PhD “The Imaginary Father”
1991: Joel Whitebook, PhD “No Longer Master, But Not Yet Homeless: The Autonomous Ego and the Recentered Subject”
Senior Plumsock Prize Winners
2015: Susan Finkelstein, LCSW “Psychosomatic Illness in a Claustro-Agoraphobic Patient”
Raymond S. Hoffman, MD “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”
2003: Ellen Sinkman, CSW “The Creation of a Beautiful Self: Pygmalion on and off the Couch.”
Molly Jones-Quinn, PhD “Chronic Genital Pain Serving as a Sadomasochistic Compromise Formation.”
2002: Michael Schur, PhD “The Facts of Mind: Thoughts on the Taxonomy of Unconscious Fantasy with Special Reference to the ‘New View’ in Psychoanalysis.”
1999: Judith Lutzer, CSW “Bloomsbury-Psychoanalytic Connection”‘
Frieda Plotkin, CSW “The Impact of Treatment of the Older Patient on the Analyst”
Nancy Wolf, CSW “Thinking About Reverie in Bion’s Model of the Mind”
Plumsock Committee
Helen K. Gediman, Chair, Elizabeth Fritsch, Harvey Kaplan, Kerry Malawista, Batya Monder, Arnold Richards, Joann Tur