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By Sanjay Nath
Widener University
Vol.
10, Issue 2 (Fall 2006)
Photo
of Jay Efran
This year, CPN presented Jay
S. Efran, Ph.D., with the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award
for a Lifetime of Outstanding Teaching and Scholarship in
Constructivist Psychology. For those of you who were in San
Marcos, you may recall Jay’s wonderful magic show at the
banquet. Jay is truly deserving of this award, as his
academic and clinical career has been magical.Jay is a Professor Emeritus at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has had (and continues to have) an academic career that is governed by a search for understanding the human mind, no matter what type of inter- disciplinary foray that entails. Jay began his career as a graduate student at Ohio State, where he first encountered George Kelly as a mentor. Kelly’s work profoundly influenced Jay’s clinical and scholarly career. However, Jay brings his own special charisma and acumen to any project he undertakes. Much of his work is truly inter-disciplinary in the best sense of the word. Believe it or not, one of his early clinical treatments for public speaking anxiety (Woy & Efran, 1972) is currently on APA’s list of empirically validated treatments. He has drawn on Maturana and Varela’s biological framework in outlining his own ideas about psychotherapy and change in his influential book Language, Structure, and Change: Frameworks of Meaning in Psychotherapy (Efran, Lukens, & Lukens, 1990). He has written cogently and lucidly about clinical topics relevant to constructivist therapists, and produced the highest caliber of philosophical and theoretical scholarship on radical constructivism, linguistic ambiguity, and metaphor. For decades, Jay has also had a profound impact as a teacher. At the CPN conference this summer, a clinical student who was currently enrolled in Jay’s course told me, “Dr. Efran is the best teacher I have ever had.” I have heard those words again and again from Jay’s students over the years. Jay is down-to-earth, easy to talk to, smart, funny, and in his own enigmatic way, magical. Congratulations, Jay, you are truly worthy of this award. References Efran, J. S., Lukens, M. D., & Lukens, R. J. (1990). Language, structure, and change: Frameworks of meaning in psychotherapy. New York: Norton. Woy, R. J., & Efran, J. S. (1972). Systematic desensitization and expectancy in the treatment of speaking anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 10, 43-39.
Jay Efran receiving his Lifetime Achievement Award
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