Obituary: Sander M. Abend (1932-2021)

Following several years of major health challenges, Sander M. Abend died on September 17, 2021, at the age of eighty-nine.

Sandy, as he was known to all, was born in the Bronx, where he grew up in an apartment building shared with his extended family. He was a precocious child, reading at three, and passionate about sports. He went on to graduate from DeWitt Clinton High School at sixteen, the University of Louisville, and then the University of Chicago Medical School.

We first met at the University of Chicago, where I was an undergraduate while he was a medical student. A few years later, when I came to New York as an intern, he was a senior resident in psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I applied for their residency and he was assigned to try to recruit me. He failed at that task, but we established a friendship that lasted for the next sixty-three years.

Sandy entered the Navy, had a tour in Japan, and then returned to candidacy at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, where he graduated and soon became a member of the faculty and a Training and Supervising analyst. He was strongly identified with a core group of senior analysts, including Charles Brenner (with whom he shared an office). Sandy’s published collected papers are titled Contemporary Conflict Theory (2019), the concept that symbolizes that core group.

However, Sandy was differentiated from the others by his interest in alternative schools and his study and exploration of their teaching and practice. Sandy liked study groups and was devoted to them, both within

the world of contemporary conflict theory and across its boundaries with other psychoanalytic schools.

Sandy served in leadership positions at both the American and Inter