By: Society of Clinical Psychology
Thursday, May 28, 2009

Citation

Eric Bermann

The Clinical Educator Award

Society of Clinical Psychology, 2009

 

The Society of Clinical Psychology is pleased to announce the third annual award for psychologists displaying excellence in mentoring clinical psychology graduate students, interns, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty. "The Outstanding Clinical Educator Award" is meant to recognize those individuals who have been outstanding in supporting, encouraging and promoting education and training, professional and personal development, and career guidance to junior colleagues.

 

Across four decades, Eric Bermann has been central to the education of clinical psychology doctoral students at the University of Michigan. Beyond the fifty doctoral dissertations he chaired, and the comparable number of Michigan's version of Master's theses, students swore by him as teacher of their core courses (with off the chart instructor ratings), clinical supervisor, research supervisor, prelim chairman, (a long stint as) Area Chair, ultimately and as Mentor and Model. He was equally vital in stretching the program, early on adding family systems and community mental health perspectives to the curriculum, generating unique interdisciplinary training opportunities, and facilitating access for non-traditional students who spoke endlessly of his understanding of their multiple commitments, his flexibility, his patience, his faith in them, his high expectations of and for them. All were inspired by his scholarly reach, which extended well beyond the standard sources in psychology and psychiatry, his conceptualizations also derived from anthropology, sociology, history, public health, biology, medicine, and feminist theory, with metaphors and illustrations from film, choreography, literature, theatre, religion. His students considered his courses an intellectual feast, yet emphasized that Eric always led the journey through those resources back to their implications for understanding psychopathology, adaptation, psychological interventions -- and themselves as clinicians. And ultimately they experienced and rightly hailed him as did junior faculty for his devotion not just to their formal education but to their professional development and personal welfare.

 

It is both an honor and sheer joy to present Dr. Eric Bermann the 2009 Clinical Educator Award.