By Francesca Colzani (Chile) and Roberto D’Angelo (Australia),
Co-chairs, Muriel Dimen Fellowship Committee

We are pleased to announce the launch of the IARPP Muriel Dimen Fellowship Program!

The Muriel Dimen Fellowship Program is a 12 month program which offers a unique and tailored mentoring experience for applicants who wish to integrate relational psychoanalytic thinking into their work. This program was conceived by the late Muriel Dimen as a way for relational psychoanalysis to find new audiences who could utilize, apply and develop relational thinking, and also to enrich relational thinking through dialogue with other disciplines. The program aims to reach both non-analytic clinicians and professionals working in other fields (academic, artistic, political, literary, etc.).

Muriel described the main principles of the program as follows: “I am committed to two things: (1) the principle that the IARPP Fellowship is an opportunity for relational psychoanalysis to reach people whom we don’t know, as a way to inform communities who do not know (about) us that in fact they want to know us! and (2) transparency in the method of selection of a Fellow” (Muriel Dimen, 2014).

During 2017-2018, we will run a small pilot before the program is launched more broadly. The Fellowship Committee has accepted two exceptional candidates: one from the fields of architecture and environmental psychology, the other from political science. Mentors have been assigned to help the Fellows integrate relational thinking into their work, and to help them develop their project over the next year. The Fellows will then present their project at the 2018 IARPP Conference in New York.

We will soon be publishing details of the program, including eligibility requirements, on the IARPP website and also intend to advertise the program more widely for 2018-2019. We are also thinking of ways to adapt this program in the different local chapters.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge and thank Muriel Dimen for conceiving of this program and hope it will continue the tradition of innovative scholarship that she was known for.

Francesca Colzani and Roberto D’Angelo,
Muriel Dimen Fellowship Committee Co-chairs

For further information, please contact the Fellowship Committee Co-chairs:

Francesca Colzani
Napoleón 3565, of. 1004, Las Condes, Santiago   Chile
Email: francesca.colzani@gmail.com
Website: www.francescacolzani.com

Roberto D’Angelo, PhD
Suite 33, 8 Hill St,
Surry Hills NSW 2010   Australia
Email Roberto D’Angelo