Fred Pine, Ph.D.

The Fred Pine Ph.D. Award will be given annually to the author of an original and potentially groundbreaking paper contributing to psychoanalytic theory, technique, or development. The paper may address any of a wide range of topics, while in some way carrying forward the quality, clarity, and innovative thinking that characterized Dr. Pine’s many published works and central legacy.

The Award aims to recognize serious groundbreaking scholarship in the field of psychoanalysis ─ scholarship with the potential to advance our understanding of the workings of the mind and the capacity to expand the bounds of theoretical orthodoxy when necessary to accomplish this goal.  Upon a notable early background in developmental research (see Biographical Statement), Dr. Pine became first and foremost a clinical theorist.  A master of keen observation, Dr. Pine drew from his research, 50 years in clinical practice, and personal experience, an understanding of how human development informed clinical practice, and he crafted a uniquely assimilative, yet pluralistic, way of thinking about psychoanalytic theory. His over 70 published works (see Publications of Fred Pine, Ph.D.) and voluminous papers presented (see Papers Presented: Fred Pine, Ph.D.) highlight an ability to synthesize and integrate complex, at times ‘warring’ frameworks in psychoanalytic thought, embracing and articulating with uncanny clarity the insight and perspective they each offer to the field and, in appropriate “moments,” to effective clinical practice.

The Award also seeks to honor and express gratitude to Dr. Pine for his career-long mentorship – through half a century as a professor/teacher, head of clinical training programs, and clinical supervisor – of a veritable generation of psychoanalytically oriented clinicians and theorists, and to acknowledge his high-integrity, professional, yet humanistic embrace of the psychoanalyst ‘as person’ in the clinical context (see two articles published shortly before his death: Moments: The psychobiography of a concept (Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2021) and A Personal Odyssey Through Psychoanalytic Process and Presence, accompanied by an introduction, Ackerman, S., Fred Pine:  An Exemplary Analyst (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2021) in Publications list).