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Malcolm Owen Slavin, PhD, psychoanalyst, author, teacher, and institutional leader, died peacefully at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 21, 2026, at the age of 84. Mal was a renowned clinician, supervisor and mentor—as well as an Emeritus Founding Member of the International Council of IAPSP; Editorial Board member of the journals Psychoanalysis, Self and Context and Psychoanalytic Dialogues; and a prolific contributor to IAPSP conferences and the literature of Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis. Born in New York City, he studied at Yale University and the Sorbonne and earned his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 1972; he later served for many years as Director of Training at the Tufts University Counseling Center and was a founder, president, faculty member, and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Mal was widely respected for his effort to bring psychoanalysis into dialogue with evolutionary biology, relational theory, grief, art, and the lived complexity of human attachment. His books included The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche, coauthored with Daniel Kriegman. Last year Mal published The Story of Original Loss, a volume in the Art, Creativity and Psychoanalysis Book Series, which won the 2025 Gradiva Best Book Award. He leaves a legacy as a searching, humane psychoanalytic thinker whose work enlarged the field’s understanding of loss, adaptation, and the therapeutic relationship.