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Maurice Burke Paper Prize
The 2024 winners have been announced!
CCP is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Annual Maurice Burke Paper Prize:
- Harold Braswell, Slurring on the Couch (Early Career) - READ PAPER: Slurring on the Couch, Harold Braswell, PhD
- Erin Trapp, Reverie in Dark Times (CCP Community) - READ PAPER: Reverie in Dark Times, Erin Trapp
- Jill Gentile, Hate Speech as the Action of Inequality: A Psychoanalytic and Winnicottian Perspective (General Public)
CCP also congratulates those entrants who were shortlisted for the Maurice Burke Paper Prize:
- Scott Garlinger, Freed by Association: Eleven Visions (Early Career)
- Stacy Ruttenberg, Speech Essay (Early Career)
- Danielle Knafo, Free Association and Artificial Intelligence (General Public)
- Ross Tappen, Contrapuntal Understanding in Culture and the Psychiatric Institution (General Public)
We thank all who made an effort to contribute to the dialogue regarding the prize's essential topic. The authors of the 2024 winning entries will be invited to participate in a panel discussion during the spring — stay tuned for the program announcement.
The submission portal for the 2025 Maurice Burke Paper Prize will open on October 1, 2025, and will close on December 31, 2025.
Bios:
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Harold Braswell, PhD
Harold Braswell is a pre-licensed LMSW social worker and third-year clinical candidate at the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. He is also an associate professor of health care ethics at Saint Louis University.
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Jill Gentile, PhD
Dr. Gentile is a clinical adjunct associate professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, as well as an associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac, 2016), co-written with M. Macrone. Dr. Gentile received the 2017 Gradiva Award for her essay, “What’s Special About Speech?” and the 2020 Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) Prize for her article, “Time May Change Us: The Strange Temporalities, Novel Paradoxes, and Democratic Imaginaries of a Pandemic.” -
Erin Trapp, PhD
Erin Trapp holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Minneapolis. She is currently a second-year student in CCP’s Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 2-year program.
About the 2024 paper topic:
Free Association and its Discontents: A Controversial Discussion
The Maurice Burke Paper Prize (1)
Psychoanalysis positions itself as a psychology of liberation in its enshrinement of free association as its “fundamental” rule. Any other parameters that exist – conventions of time, payment and the like – have been created in order to protect a space in which the analysand is free to speak – and thus think – anything. It is a singular space in which thought and speech have been described as having no direct “social consequences(2),” no direct implications for immediate action, and thus it can allow for new possibilities in living. To fulfill that function, Freud and others have noted, any externally-imposed limits on this freedom threaten the work as a whole.(3)
Yet in the external world, the line between speech and action has perhaps never been less clear, as “hate speech” has spawned authoritarian social movements that collapse meaning into social oppression, and as the ramifications of limits to speech in the name of protecting vulnerability and diversity are also being reconsidered. Thus the psychoanalytic conundrum of “free speech” is amplified, leading to myriad dilemmas, which submissions are invited to address, such as:
- What are the areas of overlap and divergence between "free association" and "free speech?"
- What can be spoken in the consulting room? How much is too much? Can there be "too much?"
- What are the clinical consequences of free speech/free association, its therapeutic actions?
- What are the social consequences of placing limits on what can be thought and said, or of not doing so?
- How do limits on speech constrain thought, or even, alternatively, allow for its possibility?
- What are the implications of the psychoanalytic experiment for our efforts to speak to the political and social catastrophes we are currently facing?
Members of the general public
Members of the CCP Community
Students and Early Careers Professionals (3 years or less post-licensure)
Deadline for submissions is December 31, 2024 and winners will be announced February 1, 2025. Please specify under which of the three categories you are applying. You can submit your work here: paperprize@ccpsa.org
- Maurice Burke was a founder, board member and twice president of CCP.
- John Friedman, personal communication
- “It is very remarkable how the whole task becomes impossible if a reservation is allowed at any single place. But we have only to reflect what would happen if the right of asylum existed at any one point in a town; how long would it be before all the riff-raff of the town had collected there?” (Freud, XII: 136-7)
- Decisions of the judges will be final, and CCP reserves the right not to award a prize in a given year.