Honoring and Remembering Erika Schmidt

Linda Michaels pays tribute to Erika Schmidt and her impact and contributions to psychoanalysis, PsiAN, and the well-being of children. Erika was a part of PsiAN from our beginnings, and most recently served as our Vice Chair. She was also very active on the APsA Board, and was the immediate past president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute—the first woman, the first social worker, and the first child analyst to become their president.

Erika Schmidt was a woman of many firsts: the first woman, the first social worker, the first child analyst, and the first non-MD to be elected president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute eighty-one years after its founding. As a self-described “dissident voice within BoPS [APsA’s Board on Professional Standards],” and as a leader of the Association—she became the Executive Committee Lead Director of the APsA board—she also helped inaugurate a new era for psychoanalysis as a whole. She believed in progress for the field and believed that psychoanalysis could in turn bring change to individuals and communities, where she applied psychoanalysis in pursuit of social justice for children. She died unexpectedly in late December 2022 at age seventy-three.