Faculty news
January 14, 2008Saint Mary's College Lecturer Elise Miller Wins Essay Prize on Psychoanalysis and Culture
Saint Mary’s College lecturer Elise Miller, Ph.D., will present an award-winning paper at the winter 2008 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association on January 17 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. More than 2,000 psychoanalysts, students and other mental health professionals are expected to attend.The Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) of APsaA awarded Miller its 2007 Essay Prize for her paper titled “Narrating Trauma: Autobiography and Healing.”
The article, part of a book-length exploration of the psychodynamics of writing autobiography, discusses Dave Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (2000), his autobiographical account of losing both parents to cancer within the space of 32 days when he is a senior in college. Miller argues that because of its refusal to sentimentalize or idealize, the book raises important questions about the relationship between writing and healing. Dr. Miller is a psychoanalytic literary scholar who has published articles on American literature and on the psychology of autobiographical writing in a/b Auto/Biography Studies, Literature Interpretation Theory, the African American Review, and The Henry James Review. She teaches in the Collegiate Seminar Program at Saint Mary’s College and in the University of California at Berkeley American Cultures Program. She is also a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a special interest in the unconscious conflicts, anxieties, and obstacles unique to those who write about psychology and psychoanalysis.
CORST annually awards the $1,000 prize for the best essay on psychoanalytically informed research in the bio-behavioral sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The winning author presents the paper at a special session of the winter meeting and the paper is reviewed for publication in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA).
