Four Recipients Granted The Sigourney Award-2026 for Transformative Contributions to Psychoanalytic Thought

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Recognizing transformative contributions to psychoanalysis around the world, The Sigourney Award-2026 honors four bodies of work significantly advancing the field. Today, Robin A. Deutsch, PhD, Analyst Co-Trustee of The Sigourney Award Trust, announces this year's award-winning work by Salem Eid Al-Arjani, PhD (Gaza, Palestine); Paula Christian-Kliger, PhD, ABPP (New York, USA); Juan-Eduardo Tesone, MD, PhD (Buenos Aires, Argentina); and the University College London Psychoanalysis Unit (London, UK).

"This year's honored work engages people in new ways, through psychoanalytic methods and meaningful action. It reaches children in a war zone where catastrophe surrounds both patient and healer, addresses the divides of race and difference in business and communities, opens dialogue where silence has long surrounded incest and sexual abuse, and advances interdisciplinary research on contemporary challenges in health, society, and culture. Each body of work shows psychoanalysis doing what it does best: restoring trust, meaning, and human connection," says Deutsch.

The Sigourney Award, established by Mary Sigourney in 1989, annually rewards outstanding achievements that nurture greater understanding, innovation, and acceptance of psychoanalysis and its societal benefits. An anonymous panel of judges evaluated diverse submissions from 23 countries and selected work that champions Sigourney's vision. Full summaries of the recipients' work are available at www.sigourneyaward.org.

The Sigourney Award-2026 Recipients (Alphabetical Order)

Salem Eid Al-Arjani, PhD | Gaza, Palestine
Dr. Salem Eid Al-Arjani's cutting-edge work as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and trauma researcher holds a singular place in psychoanalysis. Operating within an active trauma field, Al-Arjani treats children in Gaza, Palestine, who have lost family, homes, or both, while he lives under the same daily threat. From within this reality, he is building a new framework for psychoanalytic treatment of trauma in its most extreme frontiers. He redefines resilience not as recovery after trauma, but as the capacity to imagine, find meaning, and stay connected while danger continues. In the case of a child, their family's sole survivor, he traces a movement from pre-symbolic shutdown and ontological collapse, in which the child could not speak at all, to renewed symbolic flexibility: the return of play, speech, and grief. Building on Ann Masten's idea of resilience as "ordinary magic," Al-Arjani's work suggests this magic can survive total devastation, offering hope and a working model for clinicians in catastrophic settings. 

Paula Christian-Kliger, PhD, ABPP | New York, USA 
Dr. Paula Christian-Kliger's extraordinary interdisciplinary work demonstrates the transformative potential of psychoanalytic ideas far beyond the clinic. A psychoanalyst, author, and artist, she has developed a relational, trauma-informed model grounded in humanistic and Buddhist practices that bring psychic and emotional layers of experience into view. Her reach is broad: intensive clinical treatment for young adults and families; leadership work in Fortune 500 companies that deepens self-awareness and strengthens collaboration; and experiential life-skills learning for neurodiverse youth. Through art-informed experiences rooted in history and origin stories, Christian-Kliger's work invites self-reflection and dialogue across race, gender, class, culture, and generations, among leaders and communities, while empowering those long-unseen and unheard. Uniting these efforts is psychoanalytic presence in action: creating emotionally alive spaces where people learn to stay with what has felt unbearable, recognize unconscious patterns, and move toward empathy, repair, and shared humanity. Alongside her clinical practice, her work demonstrates how psychoanalytic reflection can shape our collective human journey to function adaptively.

Juan-Eduardo Tesone, MD, PhD | Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dr. Juan-Eduardo Tesone, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has expanded psychoanalytic theory into a domain long kept at a distance – incest, which he calls "the unthinkable and unthought-about taboo." 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. 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 region's mental health and legal oversight organizations. Tesone's collection of fictional short stories, Impure Tales (2024), explores trauma, memory, and unconscious transmission across generations. A Professor Emeritus at Buenos Aires's Universidad del Salvador, he has taught nearly 300 Latin American doctoral candidates.

The University College London (UCL) Psychoanalysis Unit | London, UK
The University College London Psychoanalysis Unit, led by Dr. Elizabeth Allison, has done what many believed psychoanalysis could not: subjected psychoanalytic ideas to rigorous scientific testing without stripping away what makes them genuinely psychoanalytic. The Unit's team of researchers and clinicians developed and tested Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT), which strengthens mentalizing, the capacity to understand ourselves and others in terms of thoughts and feelings. In a landmark trial published in The Lancet Psychiatry, men on probation with antisocial personality disorder who received MBT showed significantly less aggression than a comparison group and had committed significantly fewer offenses after three years. The Unit has also placed the breakdown of epistemic trust at the heart of contemporary social and political dysfunction, illustrating how the work is a living research program rather than a finished product. Since 2016, the Unit has trained more than 260 psychoanalytic master's and doctoral students and engaged the public through Freud Museum exhibitions, conferences, webinars, and film.

Applications for The Sigourney Award-2027 open March 1, 2027. Discover more about The Sigourney Award-2026 recipients' work at sigourneyaward.org.

About The Sigourney Award
Founded in 1989 by psychotherapist, publisher, and community activist Mary Sigourney, The Sigourney Award Trust is an independent nonprofit that provides international recognition and reward for outstanding work advancing psychoanalytic principles. The annual Award has honored 157 recipients from 23 countries for contributions to human affairs spanning clinical psychoanalysis, the arts, neuroscience, feminism, and socio-political issues. Follow @SigourneyAward on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; @sigourney_the on X; and @sigourneyaward.bsky.social on Bluesky.