The American Family Therapy Academy is an organization of about 400 leading national and international family therapy clinicians, researchers, program directors, and policymakers. The AFTA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy recognizes outstanding contributions to family therapy theory and practice, reflecting cumulative achievement over a career. Dr. Papernow received this award in 2023.
The award presentation for the 2023 AFTA award:
This award honors Patricia Papernow as the internationally recognized and leading contributor in developing our knowledge base and clinical expertise in working with stepfamilies. Over the last four decades, she has translated the intensity and complexity of stepfamily dynamics into a comprehensive framework, giving our field a clear and usable map for this extremely common family form. She has devoted herself to disseminating this information broadly with her writing, teaching, and her training of both helping professionals and stepfamily members nationally and globally.
Patricia has published three books, multiple book chapters and dozens of articles. Her second book, Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships: What Works and What Doesn’t remains the classic in the field. That book and her other writings have been translated into Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese with Russian, Hebrew and Hungarian translations in the works.
Patricia is entering her fifth decade of making pivotal contributions to systemic clinical theory and practice. She has built bridges across nationalities, between many, varied theoretical modalities and among professional disciplines. She continues to deepen our understanding of the intersection of stepfamily challenges with diverse social and cultural contexts. Her lifetime of groundbreaking, tireless, brilliant and heartfelt work on blended families is a profoundly transformative gift to our field and to untold numbers of stepfamily members.