The BPSI Ecker Fellows Program
Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts
Director: Diane O’Donoghue, PhD
Chair, BPSI Division of Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis
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 2024-2025 Ecker Fellows:
Sandra Lim
Sandra Lim is the author of the poetry collections The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021); The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück; and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). The Curious Thing will be published in a Swedish translation, En märklig sak, by Rámus Förlag in 2024.
Her honors include the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, the Getty Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation. Her writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Baffler, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The New Republic. She was named the 2023 Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she is a Professor of English.
Sandra received her BA in English from Stanford University, her PhD in English from the University of California Berkeley, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She serves on the Editorial Board of Poetry Daily, a non-profit daily digital anthology of contemporary poetry. She lives in Cambridge, MA. Visit Sandra’s website.
Stephen Spinelli
Dr. Stephen Spinelli is Assistant Professor of Choral Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, serving there since 2022. Spinelli previously served as the assistant director of choral programs at Cornell University, and held visiting appointments at Thomas Jefferson University, Moravian College, Villanova University, and Syracuse University. In the Summer of 2024, he was appointed as Back Bay Chorale’s sixth Music Director.
Dr. Spinelli has sung with some of the country’s leading vocal ensembles. As a tenor with the Crossing, his credits include the 2018 Grammy Award®–winning recording of Gavin Bryars’s The Fifth Century. Spinelli also performed with the genre-bending vocal octet Roomful of Teeth. He assisted in the production of their Grammy Award–winning debut album, which yielded the Pulitzer Prize®–winning recording of Caroline Shaw’s Partita for Eight Voices. As a frequently engaged guest conductor, he particularly cherishes his experiences leading the Maui Chamber Orchestra and Chorus.
Spinelli is a co-founder of ONEcomposer a non-profit organization dedicated to research, publication, performance, and recording in celebration of historically excluded musical voices. ONEcomposer’s collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra to present the original orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement was hailed as “a knockout” by The Philadelphia Inquirer. On July 26, 2024, ONEcomposer will release Beyond the Years, the organization’s inaugural commercial recording, featuring previously unpublished and unrecorded art songs of Florence Price as performed by soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann. All editions, created by Dr. Spinelli from archival source material, will be published in the fall of 2024.
Spinelli was a Beinecke Library Research Fellow at Yale University from 2022–2023, where he investigated the creative partnership between Langston Hughes and Margaret Bonds. Spinelli holds degrees from Williams College, Temple University, and Northwestern University.
Christopher Trapani
Christopher Trapani earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in
Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Christopher earned a doctorate in 2017 from Columbia University in New York City. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University.
Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France,
and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus,
Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall.
Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019) and a winner of the Rome Prize (2016). He has held
fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Christopher is the winner of the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, and has been awarded commissions
from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation,
and Chamber Music America.
Waterlines, his debut portrait CD was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018, followed by
Horizontal Drift in 2022.
Christopher splits his time between New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily.
Visit Christopher’s website.
We are also pleased to announce the 2024-25 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 has an ongoing interest in how daily life is affected by our sensitivity to mortality. She does all her writing while listening to opera. Stephanie will be mentoring Sandra.
Deborah Greenman, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Cambridge on the faculty of the McLean Hospital/MGH Psychiatry Residency Program. Her ongoing engagement with music – particularly vocal study and performance – enriches her life and her work. Deborah will be mentoring Stephen.
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 Christopher.
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 |
Ecker Fellows Program Syllabi
Program Readings Syllabus, 2022-2023
To read any of the works cited, please contact Librarian Veronica Davis.
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.
