2019 Marsella Award Recipient Dr. Stephen Soldz
Dr. Soldz, a professor in the Boston School of Psychoanalysis and past president of PsySR, co-founded the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, which chronicled and led opposition to the roles of psychologists in the U.S. program of abusive interrogations during the Bush Administration. He was one of the informants for the well-known Hoffman Report, and has published reports and articles on APA collaboration in the torture program.
He served as an expert clinical consultant on several Guantánamo cases, including two cases involving juveniles.
Dr. Soldz, and others have argued that “operational” psychologists who choose to participate in activities that violate psychological ethics should first be required to surrender their professional licenses and memberships in professional psychological organizations and must not present themselves as professional psychologists.
However, nothing better attests to Dr. Soldz’s dedication to social justice, despite the personal risk, than the fact that five of the psychologists denounced in the Hoffman Report added Dr. Soldz to their list of defendants in a still-active defamation lawsuit against APA and Hoffman’s law firm.