You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Joseph Sandler did not live to see the publication of this volume celebrating his remarkable contribution to psychoanalysis; he died after a short illness in 1999, still in full flow, producing lectures, papers and books in which he revised and updated psychoanalytic theory whilst never discarding its foundations. His achievements were many and varied; he was an outstanding clinician, an inspirational teacher and his grasp of psychoanalytic theory was probably unrivalled, forming the basis for a series of research projects and conceptual reformulations which have received unusually unanimous recognition and acceptance internationally.
When I was reading this volume of essays, I found myself thinking that, in some respects, Joseph Sandler played a similar and pivotal role in the revision of psychoanalytic theory to that of Michael Fordham in analytical psychology. Both of them were thoroughly grounded in the theoretical and clinical frameworks within which they had trained, but both recognized the urgent need to integrate knowledge and insights from other disciplines into those frameworks and, in doing so, each of them revitalized their respective fields of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.
The subtitle of this volume: - ‘The work of Joseph Sandler’ is rather misleading, in that it would be more accurate to have called it ‘The influence of Joseph Sandler’. Anyone who wanted to know more about Sandler's own work and who hoped to find a detailed exposition of it here might be disappointed. Instead what we find is a series of essays by other distinguished psychoanalysts who have drawn on a range of concepts which Sandler introduced into psychoanalytic theory; these essays demonstrate the