American Psychoanalytic Association Announces the Edith Sabshin Teaching Award 2019 Recipients
Drs. Jane Rosenthal and Eileen Kavanagh are the recipients of this year's American Psychoanalytic Association Edith Sabshin Teaching Award for outstanding contributions as educators of students who are not candidates. Teaching non-candidate students is one of the most significant ways in which psychoanalysts contribute to our field, and to education. The late Dr. Edith Sabshin, in whose honor this award is named, was known for her abilities as a "natural" teacher and was the founding Chair of the Candidates' Council (previously known as the Affiliate's Council), predecessor of the current Committee on Student/Resident Associates. The Edith Sabshin Award will be presented before the start of the Afternoon Plenary during the APsaA 2020 National Meeting at around 5 pm on Friday, February 14, at the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel in New York City.
Jane Rosenthal, MD, received her BA in Social Science from the University of Michigan with High Honors and completed her medical training at George Washington University before returning to NYC for Psychiatry residency, a Consultation-Liaison fellowship and psychoanalytic training all at Columbia and a certificate in Bioethics and Medical Humanities from Albert Einstein. She remained on faculty at our Center from her graduation in 1996 until 2008, when she became director of the Consultation-Liaison Service at Tisch Langone Hospital at NYU. In that capacity and at earlier points in her training, she has been engaged with issues such as reproductive psychiatry, assisted reproductive technology, organ transplantation (including face transplantation). As you might imagine, bringing a psychoanalytic lens to these varied and interesting endeavors is as important as it is rare!
Dr. Rosenthal was responsible for creating Columbia's extremely popular and competitive Fellowship program, which she designed, built, and has run for the past 12 years. In this role, she creates monthly academic programming (8-9 times annually for 12 years!) in which psychoanalysts present their favorite paper and why it is their favorite to a group of young trainees in psychiatry and psychology who are interested in psychoanalysis. Her program has proven so dynamic that it has brought many new candidates into our institute, but perhaps even more importantly, it has helped us train interested participants in psychoanalytic ideas who never pursue additional training but who bring an enriched view of the working of the mind to their work in the various areas of psychiatry and psychology they pursue.
In addition to this, as part of her role as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, she has taught medical students, residents, and fellows to think about psychodynamics at the bedside, initially during and after her training and fellowship at Columbia. In more recent years as founder and director of the CL Psychiatry service at Tisch Hospital, she has taught trainees to look at medically and surgically hospitalized patients with an analytic lens; never has this been more true than in her current position as director of psychosocial services at the NYU Perlmutter Cancer Center where she teach fellows in consultation psychiatry, as well as a breast surgery fellow each year, to help patients adjust to 'new' identities, deal with shattered senses of body image, and to think about the next chapter of their lives, or the last chapter of their lives.
Eileen Kavanagh, MD, MPA is a member in good standing of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine – the collaborating society of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center – and of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center's faculty. She is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Columbia Department of Psychiatry and an Attending Psychiatrist of the NYS Psychiatric Institute.
From the very inception of her psychoanalytic career, beginning with analytic training, Dr. Kavanagh has been recognized and admired for her ongoing and deep dedication to psychodynamic teaching. As a psychoanalytic candidate and then a graduate analyst, she has taught psychiatry residents at the Columbia and Harlem Hospital residency programs, and psychology externs and medical students at Columbia, effectively conveying the relevance and importance of psychoanalytic understanding to the variety of often complex clinical situations these students encounter. She has been able to integrate psychodynamic understanding and its usefulness in the teaching and practice of general psychiatry and psychopharmacology.
Dr. Kavanagh is an admired teacher and supervisor. She is the founder and director of the NYS Psychiatric Residents Clinic, where, in addition to her own teaching, she has brought in talented psychoanalytic educators and supervisors. She is a supervisor and the medical director of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center's psychology externship in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, where she teaches psychoanalytic diagnosis and formulation.
If the extent of her teaching were not enough, the superb quality of her teaching has been twice recognized with the Roger A. MacKinnon Teacher of the Year Award and with the Patrick McGrath MD Award for Outstanding Teaching of Psychopharmacology.
The Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research joins the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine in congratulating these two superb educators.