Lifetime achievements to be honored by APF

Psychologists acknowledged for career accomplishments at Boston convention

By Ted Baroody

The American Psycho-logical Foundation (APF) has selected four psychologists for its 1999 Gold Medal Awards, which recognize lifetime achievement in the application, practice and science of psychology and for enduring contributions in the public interest.

Awardees receive a gold medal, $2,000, and an all-expense paid trip to APA's Annual Convention in Boston, Aug. 20-24. The awards will be presented at the APA/APF Awards Ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 21, at 5 p.m., in the Constitution Ballroom of the Sheraton Boston Hotel.

Practice award

Herbert J. Freudenberger, PhD, is the recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology. Freudenberger was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1926, into a middle-class German-Jewish family. His normal, carefree youth was interrupted when Hitler came to power. When he was 12, he escaped to the United States and eventually was reunited with his family in New York. He opened a plastic manufacturing plant to help support his family and, while managing it, attended Brooklyn College evening sessions.

Upon completing Brooklyn College, he matriculated into the New York University doctoral clinical program. After concluding clinical training, he entered into solo practice in 1956.

Since 1954, Freudenberger has held the rank of senior faculty member and training analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. He has also held appointments at the New School for Social Research; New York University; Brooklyn College; Queen's College; City University of New York; and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Freudenberger is the author of numerous articles, book chapters and monographs. Among his many honors are APA's Carl F. Heiser Special Presidential Award and the Psychologist of the Year Award from APA's American Society of Psychologists in Private Practice. Freudenberger served as president of APA's Div. 29 (Psychotherapy) and 42 (Independent Practice) and became an APA Fellow in 1972.

Freudenberger describes his involvement in psychology and his work with patients and addicts as a way of giving back to people when he thought he would not survive the Holocaust. He says he will always be grateful to America for accepting him and helping to save his life.

The Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology goes to Wendell Richard Garner, PhD. Garner, born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1921, received his master's degree in 1943 and later worked at Harvard University's Radio Research Laboratory, Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory and Systems Research Laboratory for the duration of Word War II. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1946.

Garner joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1946 and became a full professor in 1955. In 1967 he accepted the position of James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology at Yale University, and held that title until he retired in 1989. Garner has held several administrative positions during his career, including director of the Psychological Laboratories at Hopkins and chair of the Hopkins psychology department. At Yale he served as chair of the psychology department, dean of the graduate school and director of social sciences.

Garner's early research involved auditory psychophysics with a focus on the perception of very short tones. He has written several books including the influential "Applied Experimental Psychology" with A. Chapanis and C. T. Morgan (Wiley and Sons, 1949), was long the standard text in the field. His research on visual information processing and on the perception of structure led to the book "Uncertainty and Structure as Psychological Concepts" (Wiley, 1962).

Later, he elaborated on the concept of structure to include not only spatial and temporal patterns, but also relations between dimensions This work led to the publication of "The Processing of Information and Structure" (Erlbaum, 1974). He also wrote several highly influential theoretical papers, including one that established the concept of converging operations and another that considered the concept of structure.

Garner has served as vice president for psychology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as president of APA's Div. 3 (Experimental). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965.

Public Interest award

APF will bestow the Gold Medal Award for Enduring Contributions by a Psychologist in the Public Interest to Thomas Gordon, PhD.

Gordon, born in Paris, Ill., in 1918, received his BA from DePauw University, an MA from Ohio State University and his PhD from the University of Chicago. He became an assistant professor in psychology at Chicago in 1949.

As an Air Force pilot and instructor of cadets during World War II, Gordon designed a program to teach new instructors a less authoritarian way of training cadets. This experience and his later participation in the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine led to his interest in the field of group-centered leadership. When he left the University of Chicago in 1956 to work as a psychology consultant for companies, he met with employees and their children on issues of family interaction and discipline problems. Thus, Gordon began to see similarities between parent-child and leader-subordinate dynamics, an insight that motivated his design of a 24-hour parent training program, Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) in 1962.

In 1970, Gordon wrote "Parent Effectiveness Training" (Wyden Books), which described his PET parenting model. The book became an international bestseller. Soon thereafter, he founded an effectiveness training organization--Gordon Training International (GTI)--which has trained more than 35,000 instructors. GTI has also formulated a Teacher Effectiveness Training (TET) course, which more than 150,000 teachers have completed. In addition to PET and TET, Gordon developed a Leader Effectiveness Training (LET) course that is used by hundreds of companies worldwide.

An APA Fellow, Gordon is a member of APA's Div. 48 (Peace), the National Peace Foundation and the Association of Humanistic Psychology. He served as president of the California Psychological Association. He also served as a consultant to the 1970 White House Conference on Children.

Life achievement award

Lester Luborsky, PhD, winner of this year's Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology, received his PhD from Duke University in 1945. Luborsky's early research, first at Duke and then at the University of Illinois, initiated his longstanding focus on personality assessment of patients in psychotherapy, a path that eventually led to the development of the symptom-context method. This is an innovative procedure which evaluates neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms as they appear rather than retrospectively.

In 1947, Luborsky began psychoanalytic training at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka. Soon, he joined the foundation's psychotherapy research committee to help develop a clinician's assessment measure of a client's mental health and illness (often called psychiatric severity)that might be a predictor of personality growth during psychotherapy. The measure would later be added to the DSM-IV, with minor changes, as the Global Assessment of Functioning.

In 1959, Luborsky joined the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania and soon afterwards launched the Penn Psychotherapy Research Project, which evaluated patients before and after tape-recorded psychotherapy. The project assessed factors that predicted good psychotherapy outcomes. With strong support from the data, Luborsky developed his now widely-used Core Conflictual Relationship Theme method to assess the central relationship conflicts related by patients in psychotherapy sessions.

Luborsky's early manual for supportive-expressive psychotherapy for the Penn department of psychiatry eventually led to "Principles of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Manual for Supportive-Expressive Treatment" (Basic Books, 1984). This book on short-term and open-ended psychotherapy describes a technique of greater therapist supportiveness and lesser expressiveness for patients with greater psychiatric severity and the reverse balance for healthier patients.

For more than 50 years, Luborsky has been a leader in discovering some of the central factors conducive to personality growth: personality qualities associated with psychological health; formation of an alliance with a helping person; positive expectations from others and from the self; and mastery of one's core conflictual relationship theme.Y



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