Joseph Sandler (1927-1998)

On 6 October 1998, Joseph Sandler died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family, after a brief and courageous fight with cancer. He had been an outstanding psychoanalytic figure for several decades. An excellent and dedicated clinician, an original theoretician who wrote with great clarity and a pioneering conceptual researcher, he was also a gifted teacher and an inspirational leader. Softly spoken and naturally shy, in a professional life spanning fifty years, Joe Sandler contributed to the quiet revolution that psychoanalysis underwent after the war. His systematic explorations of psychoanalytic concepts led to a reformulation of the somewhat cumbersome conceptual framework of classical psychoanalysis. He translated old psychoanalytic ideas, rooted in nineteenth-century biology, into the twentieth-century language of human relationships. Joe Sandler was also a loving and generous friend to many throughout the world.

He died at the age of 71 and even when failing physically, he was still full of intellectual energy; he gave a major talk at a symposium in honour of Hanna Segal just two and a half weeks before he died.

Joe Sandler was born in Cape Town in 1927, the only child of a modest family. His parents' marriage was not a happy one and his relationship with his father was fraught. Through necessity his mother worked but when at home she focused all her emotional energy on her son, convinced from the start that, unlike his father, he would amount to something special.

His brilliance was indeed evident from a young age. He matriculated at 15 and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a first-class degree in psychology at 18. He went on to complete his Masters a year later. He was awarded the Union of South Africa Scholarship, which made it possible for him to come to England to pursue his doctoral studies. He obtained his PhD at the age of 23 and immediately started his psychoanalytic training and simultaneously began medical school at University Colleg