Nathan Schwartz-Salant

We sadly note the passing of Nathan Schwartz-Salant, an original and brilliant contributor to Jungian thought and training. Nathan passed away quietly on 18 September, 2020 at his home in Blue Hill, Maine. His death came suddenly following an illness that had been in remission for several years. At his passing was his son, Joe Salant. A year prior Nathan lost his beloved wife and collaborator, Lydia, and his younger son, James.

We wish to convey our respect, appreciation and gratitude to Nathan as analyst, supervisor, mentor and friend, primarily by acknowledging the generosity he enacted across all those roles. Nathan invited, really required, intense engagement with our common work, inspiring us with his clinical sensitivity and challenging us to intimately engage with the discomforting elements of clinical process that are essential to meriting and tolerating symbols of transformation.

Nathan's style of work was communicated through his innovative contributions to our literature in ‘On the coupling of psychic entropy and negentropy’ (1970), Narcissism and Character Transformation (1982), The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing (1988), Jung on Alchemy (1995), The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self (1998), The Black Nightgown: the Fusional Complex and the Unlived Life (2007), The Order-Disorder Paradox: Understanding the Hidden Side of Change in Self and Society (2017) and in a yet to be published final book, co-authored with his wife, Lydia Salant. Nathan also published several articles in anthologies from Chiron Publications, which he founded and edited with his friend and colleague Murray Stein. The clinical series of Chiron Publications came about to publish papers which were presented at the summer meetings of scholars and clinicians at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico in the 1980's.

The background to Nathan's work emerged from his traditional scientific studies that culminated in a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from the Unive