The BPSI Ecker Fellows Program
Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts
Director: Diane O’Donoghue, PhD
Chair, BPSI Division of Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis
The Ecker Fellows Program will be seeking applications for its fifth cohort. This is an opportunity for three, early to mid-career professionals in the performing arts to engage with psychoanalytic ideas in a one-year, non-residential, virtual fellowship. Artists are paired with an Institute faculty mentor who acts as their advisor. This dyad also participates in a group seminar of these fellows, mentors, and the Program Director. The program’s purpose is to offer members of the creative community, interested in psychoanalytic concepts a way to enrich their artistic practices, through individually-tailored study and seminar meetings. Information on how to apply will be available December 1.
In the Spring of 2022 BPSI was awarded a grant from the New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis for a program in Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis, to bring creative artists to BPSI to engage with psychoanalysis.
Called the “BPSI Ecker Fellows Program“, this yearly initiative will involve a small cohort of distinguished early-to-mid career professionals in the performing arts, who will be offered an opportunity for sustained study of psychoanalytic principles in order to deepen and enrich their creative endeavors. This will occur within a program of study tailored to each artist’s interests.
The Fellows’ year is an immersive experience in psychoanalytic ideas and engagement within the BPSI community. Fellows are invited to develop an individualized program of study with their mentors, who are BPSI members selected for their commitment and knowledge of the arts, ability to complement the Fellows’ interests, and their capacity to enrich and deepen an interdisciplinary dialogue.
The areas of interest shared between psychoanalysis and the arts are rich and vast. It is our hope that the linkages the Ecker Fellows forge at BPSI will continue in several sites: amongst themselves, with the psychoanalysts with whom they share their year, and within their respective arts communities. The Ecker Fellows Program aims to develop into an established locus of interchange between psychoanalysis and the arts, for the benefit of both of these disciplines, as well as the larger community and ultimately to strengthen connections to broader public engagements.
The 2025-2026 Ecker Fellows:
Anna Handler
The German-Colombian conductor and pianist Anna Handler was appointed Kapellmeister of the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2025. Her international career has already led her to appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Salzburg Festival. She has collaborated with distinguished artists including Kirill Petrenko, Yo-Yo Ma, and John Williams.
Handler unites conducting excellence with innovative approaches to music mediation and the intimacy of chamber music. Her work reflects a deep commitment to creating meaningful connections between music, performers, and audiences across cultures. Visit Anna’s website.
Daniel Leonard
Daniel Leonard is a composer, writer, and educator creating songs for children. His songs integrate jazz and poetry to support young children’s emotional development. He has performed at the Children’s Music Network Conference and the National Puppetry Conference. His honors for music, writing, and research include the Alumni Composition Prize from the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, the Hurley Prize from the Boston University Creative Writing Program, the Robert Fitzgerald Prize in Literary Translation, and the Alice M. Brennan Humanities Award. Daniel has served as Student Artist in Residence for the University of Leuven and as a Postgraduate Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Currently Daniel teaches English literature at Boston College and is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Boston University, where he researches how contemporary American authors use animals to explore relational aspects of the self. He is currently creating his first album. Visit Daniel’s website.
Brendan Pelsue
Brendan Pelsue is a playwright, librettist, and translator. His work has premiered at venues around the country, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the Westport Country Playhouse, Portland Stage, and the Alliance Theatre.
Commissions include South Coast Repertory, American Opera Projects, Westport Country Playhouse, the Alliance Theatre, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Brendan was the 2024 Playwright in Residence at Green College, University of British Columbia, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2017 artist-in-residence at Chateau de la Napoule, France. He received his MFA from Yale School of Drama and his BA from Brown University. He has taught at Wesleyan and Rutgers universities, and currently teaches at Waring School in Beverly, Massachusetts. Visit Brendan’s website.
We are also pleased to announce the 2025-26 Ecker Faculty Mentors:
Stephanie Brody, PsyD is a Supervising and Training Analyst at BPSI and maintains a private practice in Lexington. She is the author of Entering Night Country: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Loss and Resilience (Routledge, 2016), and is Editor (with Fran Arnold) of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership (Routledge, 2019). Stephanie has an ongoing interest in how daily life, and the capacity to live life fully, is affected by our sensitivity to mortality. With a lifelong love of music, Stephanie attends as many live performances as she can fit into her schedule. She does all her writing while listening to opera. Stephanie will be mentoring Anna.
Anthony D. Bram, PhD, ABAP, FABP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Lexington, MA; a part-time Lecturer in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School; and Vice-Chair/Associate Supervisor in the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Training Program at BPSI. He is the author of Psychological Assessment of Emotional Dysregulation in Children and Adolescents: The Bipolar Spectrum and Beyond and Psychological Testing that Matters: Creating a Road Map for Effective Treatment and co-editor of Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications in Different Settings. For fun, he and his musician son run an independent record label, FABCOM! Records. Tony will be mentoring Daniel.
Christopher Lovett, PhD is a faculty member at BPSI and maintains a private practice in Newton Centre. A former member of the editorial boards of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, he is very interested in the intersection of early, nonverbal and sensory modes of experience and more sophisticated, verbal symbolic levels of experience and their mutual influence on the sense of both aliveness and meaning. Chris will be mentoring Brendan.
Diane O’Donoghue, PhD,
Director, Ecker Fellows Program
A historian of visual cultures, Diane directs the Program for Public Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, where she is also on their faculty. She has been the Visiting Professor of Public Humanities at Brown, and for the 2023-2024 year was a visiting fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. An affiliate scholar and faculty member at BPSI, she is also Chair here of the Division for Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis.
Her psychoanalytically-focused writings often address the role of objects and spaces within the field’s foundational concepts. Since publishing On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious in 2019, she has examined the visual implications of Freud’s “Wolf Man” case, and authored a two-part series on his constructions of amnesia. Visit Diane’s website.
Paul G. Ecker, MD
Paul Gerard Ecker, MD (1919-2002) was a remarkable man whose boundless curiosity and passion for learning spanned the spectrum of disciplines from the sciences to the arts. In addition to his intellectual talents and accomplishments, his greatest attributes were those one would recognize only in his company – his remarkable gentility, kindness, insight and patience in the care of his patients and his relationships with friends and family.
Born in Cleveland Ohio, he graduated from Case Western Reserve Medical School in 1944. He joined the Navy as one of the earliest Flight Surgeons and pioneered aviation medicine. After the war, he taught at The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York before completing his psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1950. In that same year he married Henriette Juliette Dumas from St Jean, Quebec. They had two sons, Hendrik Michel (1952) and Christian Paul (1955). While in New York, he was a Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute where he designed a device to cool ultracentrifuges with liquid nitrogen.
During the Korean War he was called to serve as a Flight Surgeon and researcher outside Philadelphia where the Johnsville Naval Air Station housed the largest human centrifuge in existence. Virtually all the Mercury and Gemini astronaut candidates underwent centrifuge testing at Johnsville. He became an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and a Teaching Analyst at the Philadelphia Institute for Psychoanalysis, serving a term as President. A voracious reader who studied church history, philosophy and neurosciences, he spoke three languages and could read Latin. He had a lifelong passion for art, cultivating relationships within the art world and becoming an accomplished collector of Chinese ceramics and Gothic art.
Courtesy of Christian Paul Ecker, MD
The 2022-2023 Ecker Fellows Program
After a successful inaugural year of the Ecker Fellows Program, we are pleased to share the work that the fellows and mentors created.
The 2022-2023 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsMay 2023 |
The 2023-2024 Ecker Fellows Program
We invite you to listen to our three Ecker Artists describe their experience with the Fellowship, and how engaging with psychoanalysis has influenced their work.
The 2023-2024 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsMay 2024 |
The 2024-2025 Ecker Fellows Program
We invite you to listen to our three Ecker Artists describe their experience with the Fellowship, and how engaging with psychoanalysis has influenced their work.
The 2024-2025 Ecker Fellows
Meet the ArtistsJune 2025 |
Ecker Fellows Program Syllabi
Program Readings Syllabus, 2022-2023
To read any of the works cited, please contact Librarian Nina Rabkina.
New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis
The New England Foundation for Psychoanalysis (NEFP) is privileged to to have provided the seed funding for the Ecker Fellows Program at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The NEFP is a non-profit, 501(c)3 public charity that was founded in 1995. The NEFP’s mission is to use psychoanalytic knowledge in ways to benefit the community, and includes the Ecker Fund, which gives grants to support interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies. The Ecker Fund was given to the NEFP to honor the memory of Paul G. Ecker, MD.
