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This is a collection of papers by J. Sandler, sometimes with collaborators, published between 1959 and 1974. The papers seek to clarify and reformulate many ambiguous psychoanalytic concepts. They express ideas which have emerged from the research project of the Anna Freud Centre, known as the Hampstead Index, and are organised so as to demonstrate a developing line of thought. The reader should take them in their right order, for they are complementary and lead to the presentation of a ‘Basic Psychoanalytic Model’.
This model ‘must be seen as a frame of reference against which existing concepts can be examined’ (p. 239) and provides a basis for a ‘general theory of adaptation within the theoretical framework of a psychoanalytic psychology’ (p. 237). The development of the psychic apparatus is seen as a whole series of adaptive processes in which the apparatus is trying to cope, in the best way possible, with the demands—stemming from the external world or from the instinctual drives—made on it. These demands arouse sensory-motor representations which are chaotic and fragmentary. Their ‘experiential’ aspects are ‘scanned, processed, modified … censored before they are allowed to reach consciousness or motor discharge’ (p. 249). The psychic apparatus has, therefore, a problem-solving function directed above all by its own awareness of changes in the conscious—unconscious feeling state.
Sandler insists on the sharp distinction to be drawn between ‘the experiential and the non-experiential realms’. Experiential content (subjective experience) can be conscious or unconscious. To the extent that an individual may ‘know’ his own experiential content without being conscious of it, it becomes necessary, so argues Sandler, to conceptualise ‘the existence of a representational field upon which content can appear and be assessed’ (p. 241). In contrast, the whole mental apparatus belongs to the non-experiential realm because it is not knowable, except to a limited extent via subj