Chapter 2 A Half-Century Perspective on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: The Historical Context of Joseph Sandler's Contributions

It is indeed a pleasure to participate in a festschrift honouring the psychoanalytic contributions and achievements of Joseph Sandler, a close and long-time friend and colleague. He is indeed someone who, without being centrally revisionist or deviationist, has played a major conceptual role in the gradual transformation of the once-dominant ego-psychology paradigm, rooted in the vicissitudes of the instinctual drives and their management by an ever more complex and multifaceted ego, into a psychology of the management of feeling states and the interplay of internalized object relationships. Yet he has never lost the vital anchoring in issues of drive gratification and frustration, as the ego balances its conditions of danger and safety and adaptive regulation.

Among the arenas of our intersecting interests has been the evolving relationship of psychoanalysis with the derived psychoanalytic psychotherapies. This relationship has been shaped over time by the concomitant transformations in our theoretical and clinical understandings of the nature of psychoanalysis as both theory and praxis. This topic is therefore the focus of this presentation: the historical unfolding of the evolving relationship of psychoanalytic psychotherapy vis-à-vis psychoanalysis. My own interest in this subject began when I was a psychoanalytic candidate in the 1950s. I was fashioning, together with a group of colleagues, what turned out to be the thirty-year-long Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation. This intensive, longitudinal study of the processes and outcomes of the treatments of a group of forty-two patients, half in psychoanalysis and half in the derived and related psychoanalytic psychotherapies, followed them over the course of their treatments and their subsequent careers, and was not brought to a close until the publication of my book, Forty-two Lives in Treatment, in 1986.

This preoccupation has continued unremittingly since, both with a successor psychotherap