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Constructivist Chronicle
Jay Efran's
Lifetime Achievement
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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