The Place of Affect in the Representational World: In Memory of Joseph Sandler

The Panel at the IPA Congress in Santiago entitled ‘The place of affect in the representational world: in memory of Joseph Sandler’ lived up to both parts of its title. One of the many memorials that followed Sandler's death last year, it combined personal tributes to Sandler with a consideration of his theories of the representational world. Henry F. Smith, the Moderator of the Panel, noted that Sandler was above all a theoretical integrator, whose wish to find a link between the intrapsychic focus of structural theory and the conceptual schema of an object-relations approach led him to elaborate a concept of representations in which all of the patient's conscious and unconscious wishes included a self-representation, an object-representation and a representation of the interaction between the two. He added that, over time, as Sandler began to regard affect as the basic organiser and motivator of the psyche, he viewed representations as, variously, made up of affect, shaped by affect and, in a sense, the source of affect.

Smith was followed by Peter Fonagy, who called Sandler one of the most creative figures in psychoanalysis in the past several decades and spoke of his bringing about a quiet revolution in psychoanalytic theory. Fonagy then went on to describe the history of the concept of the intentional stance, starting with Brentano's recognition that a person's behaviour may become meaningful or understandable if we take into consideration that person's mental states, beliefs and feelings. He noted that Richard Wollheim has reinterpreted Freud's entire corpus as extending the intentional stance to unconscious states.

Fonagy then went on to describe his own work on the developmental significance of acquiring an interntional perspective, first of oneself, and later of others. He delineated three components to this developmental process. The first is mirroring: at first, the child does not experience his emotions as emotions. For the child to do so, these states mus