“I find my work endlessly fascinating,” says Rosemary Balsam, staff psychiatrist at Student Mental Health and Counseling, Yale Health, and associate clinical professor of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine. “I just love the complexities of the human psyche and doing this work to help people.”
Balsam arrived on campus 55 years ago from Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she earned an M.D. in psychiatry from Queen’s University, Belfast. Yale was introducing co-education, the campus was in social turmoil over the Vietnam War, and a re-emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement was around the corner. “It was a fascinating time to be at Yale,” she recalls. “I became very passionate about political and feminist issues.”
While working at Student Mental Health and Counseling, Balsam met pioneering giants in psychoanalysis, and their ideas inspired her to train as a psychoanalyst, later becoming a training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists of London.
“It is the most coveted prize in psychoanalysis,” says Balsam, “and I am very pleased and proud to this day. The award ceremony was in London, so some of my London relatives were able to attend along with my daughter and her family. My grandchildren were like the paparazzi. It was wonderful.”
Balsam has received many professional accolades for groundbreaking psychoanalytic work. In 2018 she was honored with the Sigourney Award, recognizing her outstanding contributions to the worldwide field of psychoanalysis, becoming the first woman from the United States to win the award. The committee praised the “radical” work of her book Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis, which established the female body as a missing element of psychoanalytic theory, an original and provocative finding.
Reflecting on Yale as her professional home for more than five decades, Balsam emphasizes the deep importance and satisfaction of work in a person’s life and shares the phrase, “…just because you’re old doesn’t mean you think old thoughts.” The latter sentiment resonates with Balsam because she has experienced something similar at the university: “Yale is never static; it shifts,” she said. “I have great respect for the way the university has embraced change through co-education, diversity initiatives, and the integration of new technologies while maintaining its high standards of excellence.”
Balsam has witnessed and contributed to Yale’s evolution, noting that Yale Health has been there for her when she needed it most. “When my first husband passed away,” she said, “I had a small child, and I needed more time during the summers. This was accommodated gracefully and cheerfully with no distinctions made because I was a widowed mother with a young one. It has been a very supportive place to work. The staff tend to love what they do because they enjoy interacting with the students, and there’s always a tremendous amount of life taking place all around them.”
