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Donald Sandner collapsed at his home in San Francisco on Easter Sunday of this year and died an hour later in a nearby hospital. His fatal heart attack was sudden and unexpected and left the Northern California Jungian community in shock and pain. Don had been a central figure in the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco ever since he was certified as an analyst in 1965 after studying in Zurich and San Francisco. He was a past president of our society and one of our most beloved teachers. For very many of us he was either a personal or control analyst and not a few found in him a spiritual mentor. The qualities that we loved and respected in him were also widely recognized in Jungian communities throughout the world. He spoke widely in the United States and Europe, giving papers and workshops at the International Congresses for Analytical Psychology in Jerusalem, Berlin, Paris, Chicago and Zurich. His plenary paper at the last International Congress was entitled ‘The bipolar split in analytical psychology’ (Sandner 1997, pp. 91-101) and was about understanding and harmonizing ‘the split in analytical psychology between the (so-called) symbolic and clinical groups’. This stirring oration received a standing ovation. In that talk, Don's genius for affirming the mystery of the psyche and using that affirmation to heal was finally shared with all his analytical colleagues. The last words of that paper are an emblem of his belief that ‘No one of us, or one part of us, can know the whole way of the psyche. The work needs us all’.
Don was born on 6 June 1928 in Mount Olive, Illinois. He went to college and medical school at the University of Illinois (in Champaign-Urbana and Chicago respectively), graduating as a medical doctor in 1953. Before entering psychiatric residency at Stanford he served in a M.A.S.H. unit with the US Army in Korea. He met his future wife Mary Hansen, a psychiatric social worker and former Fulbright scholar, soon after returning from Zurich in 1959