Lifetime Achievement Awards
for Extraordinary Accomplishments in Psychohistory
Presented by Psychohistory Forum

2^nd Meeting: March 18, 2023 (1pm – 3:30pm EST)

Recipients of the Awards:
Lawrence J. Friedman
Howard Stein
Jacques Szaluta

In Absentia Awards
Daniel Dervin
Herbert Barry III

This is our second meeting of the Psychohistory Forum’s Lifetime Achievement Awards’ Ceremony. At our first meeting, on January 14, 2023, the Lifetime Achievement Awardees were: Robert Jay Lifton, Peter J. Loewenberg, Alan C. Elms, and David Beisel.

Our second Lifetime Achievement Awards’ Ceremony will be happening on March 18, 2023 (from 1pm to 3:30pm EST). Participation is free, but the registration/ RSVP is required – via the following form:

Here are a few words about our Lifetime Achievement Awardees on March 18th, 2023:

Professor Lawrence J. Friedman

Essay in Honor of Lawrence J. Friedman — by Mark I. West
(University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

As we celebrate Larry Friedman for his many lasting contributions to the fields of psychohistory and psychobiography, I am reminded of Erik Erikson’s “Eight Ages on Man” chapter from his book Childhood and Society (1950). I first read this book in a graduate seminar on “Culture and Personality” that I took from Larry while I was earning my PhD in American Culture at Bowling Green State University in the early 1980s.  I remember Larry leading a discussion of Erikson’s ideas about the life cycle as it relates to “ego integrity” and the road to becoming “a mature adult.” In Erikson’s model, mature adults who achieve “ego integrity” are often recognized for their willingness to accept “the responsibility of leadership” and their general wisdom. This Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes not just Larry’s outstanding scholarship but also his leadership and wisdom.

Larry’s first major contribution to the field of psychohistory was The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South, which came out in 1970 while he was an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University. In The White Savage, he delves into the psychological motivations of the White Southerners who were invested in suppressing African Americans in the initial decades after the Civil War. As he thoroughly documents in the book, some White Southerners projected their own aggressive and libidinal impulses onto African Americans, and this response influenced their racist attitudes toward African Americans.

After joining the History Department at Bowling Green State University in 1971, Larry published Inventors of the Promised Land in 1975 and Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 in 1982. In both of these books, Larry combines history and psychology in his analysis of the psychological motivations of the people involved in various social and political movements in 19^th century America.

Around the same period that Larry was completing Gregarious Saints, he developed a more focused interest in psychological theorists. This interest led him to study psychoanalytic theory at the Menninger Foundation. Larry’s experiences at the Foundation resulted in him deciding to focus his next book on the history of the Menninger Foundation. In researching and writing Menninger: The Family and the Clinic, Larry moved in a new direction in terms of combining history and psychology. Instead of using psychological concepts and theories to help explain the behavior of people from the past, he used his keen skills and insights as a historian to shed light on the evolution of a psychiatric hospital and the family behind it. In the process, he showed how psychological concepts and theories are shaped in part by historical events.

After the publication of Menninger: The Family and the Clinic in 1990, Larry turned his attention to Erik H. Erikson. His work on this project coincided with his move to the History Department at Indiana University where he taught from 1993 until 2009. Taking the same thorough research approach that he did with his Menninger book, Larry spent ten years traveling between Europe and America investigating Erikson’s life and career. The result of this research is Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, which Harvard University Press published in 1999.

Toward the end of Identity’s Architect, Larry discusses Erikson’s role as a public intellectual during the 1960s.  Erikson drew on his background in psychology in his work as a public intellectual, and this intrigued Larry. Larry’s interest in how psychoanalysts and psychologists sometimes function as public intellectuals is reflected in his most recent book, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, which Columbia University Press published in 2013. In many ways, Identity’s Architect and The Lives of Erich Fromm are sister volumes.  In both of these biographies, Larry delves into the social forces that shaped these men and discusses the lasting impact of their writings.

Shortly after retiring from Indiana University in 2009, Larry moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he founded the Conference on Public Intellectuals. These conferences met annually through 2017.  Drawing on his leadership skills, he brought together scholars and activists from around the world to discuss the role that public intellectuals play in shaping social and political movements.

Throughout his long career, Larry has made lasting contributions to American history, psychohistory, and psychobiography, but there is more to his career than his long string of impressive publications. As one of his former students, I know that Larry is also a superb teacher. He asks his students hard questions, encourages them to transcend disciplinary boundaries, and insists that they engage in primary research.  Like so many others, I have benefitted from Larry’s impressive scholarship, his excellent mentoring, and most of all his wisdom.

The following chronology covers key events in Lawrence J. Friedman’s life and career: 

1940—Lawrence J. Friedman born October 8^th in Cleveland, Ohio
1962—Receives BA from University of California, Riverside
1965—Receives MA from University of California, Los Angeles
1967—Receives PhD in American History from University of California, Los Angeles
1968—Joins the faculty at Arizona State University as Assistant Professor of History
1970—Publishes The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South
1971—Joins the faculty at Bowling Green State University as Associate Professor of History
1975—Publishes Inventors of the Promised Land
1977—Promoted to Full Professor of History and American Studies at Bowling Green State University
1982—Publishes Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870
1990—Publishes Menninger: The Family and the Clinic
1991—Named Distinguished University Professor at Bowling Green State University
1993—Joins faculty at Indiana University as Professor of History and Philanthropy
1999—Publishes Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson
2003—Co-edits Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History with Mark D. McGarvie
2006—Retires from Indiana University’s History Department
2009—Joins Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative
2009—Founds Conference on Public Intellectuals
2013—Publishes The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet
2014—Begins research project on the One World Movement

Mark I. West, PhD, is Professor of English, as well as the recent Chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has taught since 1984.  In addition to performing administrative duties, he regularly teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature.  He has written or edited 19 books, the most recent of which is Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill (2022). Before entering academia, he worked as an early childhood educator and professional puppeteer.  His email address is miwest@uncc.edu.  ❑

[Editors’ Note: We wish to express our profound appreciation to Professor West, the Bonnie E. Cone Professor in Civic Engagement and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for his diligent solicitation of the majority of the Festschrift submissions.  This is one in a long list of contributions he’s made to further the work of our honoree.]

Professor Howard Stein

Howard Stein has written about 35 books and touched innumerable people with his scholarly insights, poetry, and personality. To give a sense of his influence, I will provide a few selections from his 2022 Clio’s Psyche Festschrift, starting with selections from David Beisel’s piece and then selections from what Peter Petschauer wrote.

Listening with Howard—David R. Beisel (SUNY)

February 22, 2022. Russia invades Ukraine. I am putting the finishing touches on my Howard Stein tribute.  Serendipitous or synchronistic, both things arrive together, a conjunction of events changing my dialogue with the world. Process demands a rewrite, but how to intertwine both strands? Standing in this place and time (after a life lived immersed in psychohistory), I owe a debt to many colleagues, especially my dear friend, Howard Stein.

In the traditional Festschrift, authors customarily use the honoree’s scholarly contributions as inspiration to write an original essay.  Using Howard’s work as a touchstone, I want to do the same, showing how he has influenced my work on the origins of World War II and my thinking on the war in Ukraine.

I have heard Howard present at many scholarly conferences and seen his gentle touch as a Group Process Analyst at regular meetings of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA). I have also read just about everything he has written, from his many books to articles in places such as Mind and Human Interaction, to his recent analyses of contemporary politics in The Journal of Psychohistory, to his psychohistorical poetry.  He has called me a scholar’s scholar. I return the compliment.

We met first in 1978, at the first IPhA convention. We discovered a mutual interest in the relationship between local group fantasies and national group fantasies. We wondered how micro-fantasies reinforced macro-fantasies, and vice versa.  We set out to do a panel on the subject. I don’t remember my topic, but I do remember Howard’s.  He explored the pattern of requests sent by an audience of classical music enthusiasts to a local Oklahoma radio station. He hypothesized that the thematic patterns he uncovered in the music told something of the emotions shaping unconscious impulses on the national level, as well as how nationwide fantasies helped shape the impulses behind those local requests.

His work was creative and sensitive.  I was awed.  Our research soon took us down different paths.  Years passed.  An echo of our now abandoned earlier collaboration showed up in the Preface to his collection of essays, Beneath the Crust of Culture, where he pointed out how “the local can help illuminate universal processes” (Stein, 2004, p. xii). I wonder today what our professional careers might look like had we continued to explore mutual micro-macro reinforcements.

But what to highlight from the vast range of Howard’s fertile mind?  His work, so far-reaching and profound, makes it difficult to decide. One strand is the theme of listening, not surprising for someone who identifies himself as a psychoanalytic anthropologist. Howard’s whole career has blended the approach of the anthropologist with the tools of the psychoanalyst. In his book, Listening Deeply (1994/2017), as well as in his other writings, Howard tells us why it is important to listen, shows us how to listen, and shares what he has learned from listening.  As an organizational consultant who helps groups become more efficient, Howard’s hands-on experiences offer us how-to examples. Case studies illustrate his techniques. I hear implicit in Howard’s writing the mandate to abandon orthodoxies and simply listen to what is being said, improvising is necessary if we are ever to get at what our sources are really telling us.

For historians, listening means listening to documents. Here, Howard’s influence on me has been immeasurable. In his early papers, Howard called attention to folie à deux in human affairs.  I knew the theory, of course, but Howard’s reminder came at the right time. Alerted to how rationalizations covered projections and systems of hidden collusion, I began to listen to historical narratives differently.

I listen as Howard might listen, hearing impressions, bits and pieces of undigested raw data, too sparse and too soon to be analyzed. These are suggestive, fragmentary thoughts, which are presented as such to encourage the reader to consider various possibilities.

Part of any psychoanalytic training, of course, is countertransference. In Listening Deeply, Howard Stein provides a Master Class in dealing with countertransference occasioned by events in his own life.

He offered his insights in classrooms, consultations, talks at various institutions and conferences, radio interviews, articles, book chapters, books, symposiums, and poems. By cooperating with authors from different fields, he learned and taught at the same time.

Professor Howard Stein: Intellectual, Psychohistorian, Writer, Poet
— by Peter W. Petschauer (Psychohistory Forum Research Associate)

From the Clio Psyche’s Festschrift dedicated to Howard Stein:

Introduction

Professor Howard Stein is one of the most astute scholars and insightful human beings I have had the pleasure of meeting. Important as well, in spite of his success as a scholar, he has remained supportive of others and humble. Those of us who have known him for long periods already know this about him and also his immense scholarly breadth and depth, and respected breakthroughs in the field of psychohistory.  We know about this because of his amazing volume of work, and because he spoke and wrote from the later 1970s until the present. One can access individuals’ lives work by listing all of their accomplishments, that is, positions held, books and articles written, students taught, colleagues mentored, and yet know little about the reasons they accomplished so much. A series of numbers, or even titles, do not tell us what made Stein tick, so to speak, why he worked so hard, and what he was thinking as he searched, taught, and wrote.

One point beyond the list of Stein’s work is the question: Why write?  Why write almost beyond exhaustion?  He says that he wrote because he had to write.  He writes, he said in an email to me, because he was groping, trying to find himself through organizing his thoughts on pages and computer screens (personal communication, August 31, 2021). He writes because he needs to defend himself against anxieties by placing them outside of himself.  At the same time, he needs others, his listeners and readers, without whom he can neither put himself out nor defend himself, but also because he could not rely on others with whom to interact and with whom to learn. His search is not on people, it is with people, we are his research partners. This in large part explains why he can narrate the stories of others so well.

Howard the Man

Dr. Stein’s name is apt. He is a rock of values that are not washed off just because our society has allowed its negative side to emerge from the shadows. He has the temerity to speak up and cry out for those who are crushed by society’s uncaring, deceitful, abusive, lying, and brutal “leaders.” The exceptional Russian author Vasily Grossman in his novel Stalingrad (translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, 2019) saw it in German society of the 1930s when its underbelly rose to the top. We notice the corrosion in this country in Stein’s work long before the behavior of some untoward American corporate figures rose to “lead” organizations. Corporations, he reiterates, do not care about human beings, they care about the bottom line; that approach depersonalizes and objectifies people, making them into disposable “things.” It takes courage to comment on and highlight this upending of our culture.  Even though Dr. Stein’s assessment is accurate, it can be dangerous to articulate. If Stalin had not died, Grossman would most likely have been arrested; he told the truth about the German and Soviet/Russian societies. Professor Howard Stein is such a perceptive and courageous individual in our midst. He teaches us that one listens, becomes immersed in their lives, and hopefully helps ease transitions.

In order to understand and articulate lived workplace experience in-depth, Stein wrote hundreds of “organizational” poems and elucidates them through storytelling and exploring underlying psychodynamic processes. He began to write poetry in 1991; so far, he has published ten poetry books. But these publications do not reflect the full oeuvre of several hundred poems. Being away from the center encouraged poetry that was not as much about it as the periphery. In addition, part of his approach is to highlight stories, but through poetry, that is, people telling of their experiences and then melding them with his ability to reflect on them succinctly.

Poetry is said to be expressive of the inner and maybe even unconscious world. Stein argues differently: The “inner world is always in relationship with the outer world of people, nature, technology.” Indeed, we need words to express ourselves; we acquire them through our fellow human beings, and the tone and message of a poem rarely flow without the language specific to a culture. It carries the whole culture with it. Thus, psychohistorical poetry enables Stein to offer another fascinating perspective.  It breaks the rigidity of psychohistory, with its emphasis on compositions, and allows others of us who endeavor to write psychohistorical poetry to face the public with it.

Dedication to Howard Stein Written for 3-18-23 Lifetime Achievement Awards Celebration:

Working, be it planning, writing and presenting for and with you, dear Dr. Howard Stein, has been demanding and a pleasure. It has become particularly so when you became my mentor in poetry. For me, your encouragement to express myself through poetry as a psychohistorian and individual opened doors not only to rethink topics I had studied before, but also to tackle issues I had hesitated to approach.

An example is my exposure through personal experience with the Holocaust and my teaching about it.  Although I wrote articles about aspects of it to make sense of it, I can now succinctly portray the horror of it in terms of its history and the individuals who experienced it. You, Howard, helped in every aspect of this poetic expression.

On a recent trip to Spain, I was reminded of you in the huge medieval Jewish Quarters in Toledo and then again, the much smaller one in Salamanca. Lion Feuchtwanger’s Die Jüdin von Toledo (1955) offers unique insight into this situation. Why think of you, Howard?  A large part had to do with realizing that the most Catholic Queen Isabella of Spain asked the most highly educated persons of her realm to either convert to Christianity or to leave her realm.  Her power grab thus interrupted a four-hundred-year period in which Moors, Jews and Christians lived together in reasonable harmony.

You remind me of the educated elite and its success in the U.S., and the simultaneous threat that this success poses to the group. It is like the hostile forces opposed to Jews in Europe at the end of the 15th century and in the 1930s and 40s, that is raising its ugly head again in this century.

Further, there is the connection of authoritarians of the early modern period, one of whom happens to be applauded for sponsoring the discovery of the New World, and those of the 20th and now also the 21st century. In order to consolidate and expand their states, these leaders aspired and aspire to conquer territory on the backs of the inhabitants who paid taxes and fought and died on battlefields.  Uniformly consolidation has also meant persecution, if not outright exclusion and murder of minorities, usually including Jews.

Howard, you held “my feet to the fire“ several times when I ignored style and wording to make points similar to this in poetry. You reminded me that my work must accurately reflect facts, even theories and ideologies, while working succinctly.

How fortunate I am to be able to call such a genius as you, “friend and teacher.”

Professor Jacques Szaluta

Jacques Szaluta: A Lifetime of Achievement
— by Ken Fuchsman (University of Connecticut)

Jacques Szaluta is one of the few psychohistorians who has a doctorate in history and is a practicing psychoanalyst. When I was new to psychohistory, Paul Elovitz recommended two books to me, one of which was Jacques’ Psychohistory: Theory and Practice (1999). Szaluta has also written on Marshall Petain, Sigmund Freud’s Ego Ideal, Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, as well as a variety of Steven Spielberg films. For decades, he was a history professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island. Dr. Szaluta’s long and winding road to these lifetime achievements began with a childhood trauma.

When he was a six-year-old Jewish boy living in his native Paris, the Germans conquered the city. France was no longer a safe haven for any Jew. But where could a Jewish child be secure under Nazi rule?  He left Paris with his mother and sought refuge in a variety of locales. Finally, his determined mother arranged for him to cross the border into Switzerland.  She was able to get her precious son out of France but not herself. Jacques’ father was arrested and succumbed to death in Auschwitz.  His mother was also imprisoned in that horrific camp and barely survived the war.

Meanwhile, young Jacques Szaluta was a displaced person living with a Swiss family. He was far removed from his family and the threats every Jew faced in Hitler’s France. Jacques took to education and his excellent writing was singled out in school. When the Germans were defeated, life in France was still uncertain. Jacques was 12. His family sent him alone to New York to live with his aunt.  He was still displaced.

After graduating high school, he entered the U.S. Army. His advanced specialty was in the military police (MP).  As an MP, Szaluta was sent to Germany in the early 1950s.  As he was fluent in English, German, and French, he was useful to the American army. He appreciated this recognition, which led to something dawning on him.  As Szaluta describes it: “I had a eureka moment, as I suddenly felt that after I left the Army, I would study to become a high school teacher. And later on, due to what had occurred to me, which had become unconscious to me, at first, I thought I would become an historian—and perhaps write history.”

Upon being discharged from the Army, he entered New York University. After earning his bachelor’s degree in history in 1959, he was accepted into graduate school in history at the prestigious Columbia University, which at the time had about the most distinguished history department in the country. He did his dissertation on Marshall Petain, the wartime ruler of France under Nazi occupation. Szaluta’s dissertation adviser was Rudolph Binion. Dr. Binion, of course, became a highly influential scholar in many specialties including psychohistory.  He would play an important part in Szaluta’s career.

After Jacques obtained his freshly minted doctorate, he began looking for a history faculty position in the greater New York area. One of the places he applied to was the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. There were a number of qualified applicants. One thing that gave Szaluta a step up was the letter of recommendation written for him by Richard Hofstadter, the most prestigious American historian at the time, and he earned his position there.

Once established at the Merchant Marine Academy, Dr. Szaluta remained there for the entirety of his academic career. His teaching was so acclaimed that the school’s administration employed him to assist other faculty in improving their instruction. Upon his retirement as a full professor, he was an adviser to the student newspaper and retained an office on campus. To this day, Szaluta regularly attends events at the Academy.

Just because he had a secure full-time faculty position did not mean that Dr. Szaluta was finished with his professional development. He decided to become a psychoanalyst and received his training at the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training, which was founded and directed by Dr. Reuben Fine.

Jacques has combined his interest in Freud and analysis with his historical expertise and from early on has participated in the International Psychohistorical Association.  He has been a contributor to both Clio’s Psyche and the Journal of Psychohistory.

In the early 1980s, a fortunate break came Dr. Szaluta’s way. His former professor Rudy Binion had been asked to write a book in French introducing psychohistory. He passed the request on to Jacques, who took it up. Szaluta’s French-language book came out in 1987. There were 16,000 copies in the first edition, which led to another edition in about 1991. It was popular enough to be sold in Paris department stores.  Later he wrote an English version, which Peter Lang brought out in 2001; it’s still in print.  As an expansion and follow-up on this endeavor, Szaluta became interested in writing about Sigmund Freud’s ego ideals, for which he has written articles and presented papers at conferences. He is also a discerning psychohistorical film critic. In short, Dr. Jacques Szaluta has come a long way from the time he was a young Jewish boy displaced from his family by Hitler’s military conquests. A cheer for Jacques for not only receiving this Lifetime Achievement Award but for what he has made of his life after the hardships of his childhood!

Professor Daniel Dervin
(who regrettably cannot be with us during this Award Ceremony)

Daniel Dervin spent most of his career at the University of Mary Washington
(Materials written or compiled by Paul H. Elovitz of The Psychohistory Forum and Clio’s Psyche)

Daniel Dervin was born in Nebraska in 1935 and educated at Creighton University (1959, Omaha) and Columbia University (1970) where he took his doctoral degree in English Drama & Comparative Literature. His Honors MA Thesis was on Tennessee Williams. He won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and subsequently various prestigious literary prizes. Dr. Dervin spent most of his career teaching literature from a psychanalytic and psychological perspective at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. He published numerous books on applied psychoanalysis and psychohistory, presenting regularly at the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA). After retirement from teaching, he rented off a space in Fredericksburg so he could continue to write and publish without the interruptions of home life.

In terms of journals, Professor Dervin published in American Imago, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Clio’s Psyche, Journal of Psychohistory, Psychocultural Review, Psychoanalytic Review, and The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, as well as elsewhere. In Clio’s Psyche, he wrote a symposium paper on the history of childhood. Dr. Dervin was also active in the theater and has been a lifelong published poet (for example, in 1998-1999, several of his poems were anthologized in two collections by Columbia Publications).

Professor Dervin’s books include:

1975—Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Bucknell University Press; this was his revised dissertation, done under Steven Marcus)
1984—A Strange Sapience: A Psychoanalytic Study of Creativity in D.H. Lawrence (U. of Mass. Press).
1985 Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema (The Analytic Press)
1990—Creativity and Culture: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Creative Process in the Arts, Sciences, and Culture (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press)
1996—Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (Fairleigh-Dickinson Univ. Press)
1997—Matricentric Narratives: Restoring Agency to Women’s Writing (Edwin Mellen Press)
1998—Home Is Another Country: A Collection of Stories (Mary Washington College Press)
2004—Father Bosetti in America: A Biographical Study (Cache Glades Publications)
2017—The Digital Child: The Evolution of Inwardness in the Histories of Childhood (Routledge)

Professor Herbert Barry III,
(who regrettably, also cannot be with us during the Award Ceremony)

(Materials written or compiled by Paul H. Elovitz of The Psychohistory Forum and Clio’s Psyche)

Herbert Barry, III, PhD, now in his 90^th year, was educated at Harvard and Yale. He taught at the University of Connecticut prior to serving as a research professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy for 38 years while also teaching in the Psychology Department. For about 30 years, Professor Barry published extensively on the Presidents of the United States, focusing especially on birth order, longevity, first names that induce special affiliation with their father or mother, and slogans associated with their Presidencies. For over 20 years, he served as Co-Director of the Psychohistory Forum’s Research Group on the Childhood, Personality, and Psychology of Presidents and Presidential Candidates.  He regularly flew to New York to present at the Psychohistory Forum and the International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA) on presidential candidates and elections. He has over 250 publications and is a proud member of MENSA. Below you will find a chronology of some important activities in his life.

Below I will list with dates an outline of Barry’s life with some professional milestones:

1930: On June 2, Barry was born in New York City to Herbert and Lucy Manning Barry.
1952: Received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University.
1953: Received a Master of Science from Yale University.
1957: Received a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University at age 27.
1957: Became a USPHS-NIMH research fellow at Yale University.
1960: Became an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University.
1961: Became an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut.
1963: Became a professor of pharmacology and a research associate at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh.
1967: Received the Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.
1970: Became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
1974: Served as a field editor of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
1975: Became a fellow of the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association.
1978: Joined with Paul H. Elovitz in creating the Research and Publication Project on the Political Psychobiography and Psychobiography of Presidents and Presidential Candidates.
1978: Attended the first International Psychohistorical Association (IPhA) conference and almost all of the remaining conferences until COVID made in-person conferences too dangerous.
1980: Served as president of the Division of Psychopharmacology of the American Psychological Association.
1986: Contributed a psychobiographical essay on each President of the United States for the monthly newsletter of Western Pennsylvania Mensa.
1987: Became a professor of pharmacology and physiology at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
1991: Co-authored “Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry.”
1992: Published with Paul H. Elovitz, “Psychobiographical Explorations of Clinton and Perot,” Journal of Psychohistory Vol. XX (Fall 1992).
2001: Became Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.
2017: Wrote “Donald Trump and Other Presidents who Defeated Nominee of Rival Political Party.”
2017: Honored as a Distinguished Humanitarian by Marquis Who’s Who.
2023: Honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Psychohistory.

Standards for Lifetime Achievement Awards           

Awardees must be alive and are required to have published, at the minimum, at least one specifically psychohistorical monograph and to have written extensively in the field. Teaching psychohistory (including psychobiography) and service to psychohistorical journals and organizations are treated as valuable supporting contributions in choosing recipients.  Because there is a backlog of major contributors to the field who are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s and often in ill health, rather than simply having one awardee per year, the Psychohistory Forum has elected to honor a variety of our most deserving colleagues. Below are the standards for Lifetime Achievement Awards, as well as references for awarding young colleagues and other major contributors to psychohistory. We welcome nominees who fully meet our requirements. Send your nominees to cliospsycheeditor@gmail.com, who will vet them and discuss their candidacy with the Leadership Team of the Psychohistory Forum and Clio’s Psyche.

Also, any colleague of at least 65 who has a Festschrift published in Clio’s Psyche will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. Festschrifts have been published in Clio’s Psyche honoring David R. Beisel, Robert Jay Lifton, Peter J. Loewenberg, Howard Stein, and Vamik Volkan.

Ground Rules for Psychohistory Forum Awards

• Recipient must be living
• A medallion or certificate is given to the recipient
• Young Scholar/Clinician Awards for people 40 or under are granted.
• Except for Lifetime Achievement Awards, recipients are usually expected to:
  • Have presented recently to the Forum and/or have published in Clio’s Psyche
  • Have their awards announced at the IPhA or some large venue at an Awards Ceremony

After completing our backlog of Lifetime Achievement Awards, we plan to give only two awards per year, either the Young Scholar/Clinician and Psychohistory Award or two awards selected from the following:

• Childhood and Its History Award
• Lifetime Achievement Award
• Psychobiography Award
• Psychohistory Award
• Psychohistory Teaching Award
• Young Scholar/Clinician Award

For more information about this event and other activities of Psychohistory Forum, please feel free to reach out to Paul Elovitz (cliospsycheeditor@gmail.com) or Inna Rozentsvit (inna.rozentsvit@gmail.com).