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In the foreword to this book, Wallerstein describes Professor Sandler's contribution to psychoanalysis under two rubrics, methodological and conceptual. One facet is the scholarly research enterprise by which all science tests its hypotheses and accrues new empirical knowledge. The other, the theory building enterprise that generates new hypotheses to be tested for their fit with clinical findings. This is both a complementary and concise summary of Sandler as a theoretician whose work is firmly set within the Freudian psychoanalytic mainstream.
Within this volume of twenty-one papers, some with other authors, Sandler has comprehensively brought together work carried out over more than twenty years at the Anna Freud Centre. The various chapters describe the work which has emerged from the research project known as the Hampstead psychoanalytic index. The process of indexing is described in the appendix. (The pilot study involved indexing psychoanalytic material of fifty children in five-times-a-week analysis.) Beginning with a paper first published by Sandler in 1959 titled ‘The background of safety’, perhaps one of his most original contributions to psychoanalytic theory, he introduces the concept of ‘safety’ and the associated ‘safety principle’. The latter he suggests mediates the development of the reality principle from the pleasure principle. While he refrains from developing this notion in detail, he does describe at length the concept of safety which he believes develops from an integral part of primary narcisstic experience which exists in rudimentary form from the time of the earliest experiences of need satisfaction. Constant reference is made to this illuminating paper in later chapters.
In the third chapter there is Sandler's paper on ‘The concept of the superego’, which was the first major piece of research reported from the index project. Building on Freud's concept of the superego, he attempts a theoretical reformulation of it with an emphasis on the mo