Sam Gerson, Ph.D. is a founder and Past-President of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) where he is currently on the faculty and serves as a Training and Supervising Analyst.
Dr. Gerson is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an Editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
In 2007 he received the "Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Genocide and the Holocaust" from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his paper entitled "When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust"; this paper was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2009. This year at the IPA Congress in Prague he presented his current work entitled "'Mourning and Melancholia' After the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Suicides of Jean Amery, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi".
In addition to his research and writing about massive trauma, Dr. Gerson's work covers a variety of aspects of psychopathology; his most recent published paper is entitled "Hysteria and Humiliation" and appeared in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in October, 2011.
Intersubjectivity; gender and sexuality; interaction of affect and clinical judgment; the process of therapeutic interactions; schools of psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Certificate in Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco, CA
PhD, University of Texas, Austin
Honors
Elected panelist, Video Grand Jury, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP-WEB), November 2013-present.
Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Genocide and the Holocaust. International Psychoanalytic Association, Berlin, Germany, July 26, 2007.
Gerson, S. (2011). Hysteria and humiliation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21:517-530.
Gerson, S. (2011). Humiliation and the cultural and relational structuring of hysteria. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(5): 548-550.
Gerson, S. (2011). The Myth of Samson: Omnipotence, Alienation, and Destructive Narcissism. Studies in Gender and Sexuality. 12(2):89-96.
Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: Memory, mourning and witnessing in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Int. J. Psychoanalysis, 90: 1341-1357.
Reprinted in Psyche: Zeitschrift fur Psychoanlyse, March 2011, 65(3): 193-217.
Reprinted in Aron, L. & Harris, A. (Eds.) Relational Psychoanalysis, V4, Routledge, New York: 2011.
Gerson, S. (2008). Unconscious phantasy and relational reality. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 28(2): 151-168.
Gerson, S. (2006). The elusiveness of the relational unconscious. Psychoanalytic Dialogues. 16(2): 217-225.
Gerson, S. (2004). The relational unconscious. Implications for intersubjectivity, "thirdness", and clinical process. Psychoanal. Quart., 73:101-136.