Judd Marmor, M.D., a former APA president and professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, has made a generous gift to APA. It is $150,000, and it is to underwrite a special award lectureship at each APA annual meeting.

When Psychiatric News asked Marmor why he had endowed the lectureship, he replied, "I feel a strong attachment to the American Psychiatric Association. The lectureship is one way of showing it. I also wanted to make a statement. I wanted to make sure that we always have in our program a specific situation in which an individual who is contributing significantly to the broadest possible understanding of human personality and development would be honored."

In other words, each award will be given to someone who has advanced the biopsychosocial model of psychiatry. "What I wanted to avoid," Marmor explained, "was a tendency toward a reductionistic approach that tries to explain mental illness, for example, in terms of a single factor. I wanted it to always be within the broadest possible biopsychosocial context."

In fact, Marmor said, he wants the criteria for the award to be sufficiently wide in scope that even a person in the arts who has made some especially noteworthy contribution to the understanding of personality and development might be selected.

"I see [the endowment of the award lectureship] as a marvelous thing," Marmor’s son Michael, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in an interview. "I think he saw the lecture as a way to encourage knowledge and discourse at the cutting edge of science and psychiatry, of looking broadly at the knowledge of how the brain works relative to what psychiatry can do, and encouraging people to think about the basis of the field rather than just the latest technology or popular approach, particularly in the analytic areas.

"And I also think it will be a marvelous way of remembering more than 50 years of contributions that he made scientifically to therapy, to the social structure of psychiatry," Michael Marmor continued. "He has been a major contributor in understanding the therapeutic process and in broadening our understanding of social conditions. . . . He has been one of the giants of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for 60, 65 years—he is 90 years old."

The first Marmor Award Lectureship was presented at this year’s annual APA meeting in Chicago. It went to Solomon Snyder, M.D., a professor of neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Marmor was on hand for the lecture, which drew a large crowd of interested psychiatrists.

"Dr. Snyder is one of the world’s preeminent scientists and an honored member of our profession," said APA Medical Director Steven Mirin, M.D. "His selection, as the first Marmor Award recipient, is a great start for what I know will be an exciting educational event for years to come."

Before Snyder spoke, past APA Assembly Speaker Donna Norris, M.D., announced the establishment of the lectureship and introduced Marmor to heavy applause.

"APA," she exclaimed, "is honored that Dr. Marmor has generously endowed this award lecture."