In December 1986, Joseph Sandler was interviewed by Estelle Shane. His salient contribution to psychoanalysis and his position, both within the American and on the international scene, make his views of special interest. His latest publication, From Safety to Superego, will appear shortly.
Dr. Shane: Dr. Sandler, it seems to me you have been an important figure in psychoanalysis for many years. My memory tells me around 35.
Dr. Sandler: I don't know how long I've been a “figure”, but I graduated as an analyst almost 35 years ago.
Dr. Shane: Could you say something about your background?
Dr. Sandler: I was born in South Africa in 1927, and in 1945, I took my B.A. in psychology and social anthropology at the University of Capetown. After getting my M.A. in psychology in 1946, I got a scholarship to go abroad, so I left South Africa to do a Ph.D. at the University of London. I went to the Institute of Psychiatry—the Maudsley Hospital—and my thesis was on Rorshach content analysis. Then, through a series of strange circumstances, I found myself, in 1948, in analysis with Willi Hoffer. Rather to my surprise, I found myself at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Dr. Shane: What do you mean, to your surprise?
Dr. Sandler: I had attended a therapeutic group run by an older colleague of mine at the Maudsley Hospital because he wanted me to do some statistical work on the group. The group members started to make comments about me as a visitor. I hadn't expected this at all. It gave me an anxiety dream, and I went to my colleague who said that I might be interested to have some analysis. He said he could suggest someone I could see who had been his own analyst. So I went to see him. I didn't know who he was. Later, I discovered he was a training analyst, but in the meanwhile, I'd mentioned that I was in analysis to Clifford Scott who was also at the Maudsley and at that time was a serious figure in the British Society. He said, “Oh, you must train.” I said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “You must train to be an analyst.” So I said, “Fine.” And in a day or two, I heard from Willi Hoffer that Clifford Scott had suggested I should apply for training and that he had no objection. So I found myself attending lectures and seminars at the Institute, and taking on a case, and then another case.
Dr. Shane: In other words, it was all serendipitous—you hadn't really thought about becoming an analyst?
Dr. Sandler: No, certainly not consciously. I was very much a learning theorist. I'd been brought up on statistics and Clark Hall's learning theory. My first proposal for a doctoral project at the Maudsley was a plan to decondition phobic patients under hypnosis, but my supervisor, Aubrey Lewis, turned this down.
Dr. Shane: Perhaps your original interest in areas other than analytic made it easier for you, in time, to be an innovator in the field.
Dr. Sandler: I think it did help me. When I was in the middle of my analysis, my analyst urged me to go to medical school. You see, he had a Ph.D. in psychology and had then become a physician, and now I think he wanted to mold me in his image. And I resented it, I think, without knowing it. I never wanted to practice medicine.
Dr. Shane: That's very interesting. So you went through medical school …
Dr. Sandler: Yes, in London at University College Medical School.
Dr. Shane: I suppose it hasn't been to your disadvantage anyway.
Dr. Sandler: Well, if my kids got a cold, I could tell if it was serious.
Dr. Shane: But do you think it has been helpful to you in your work as a psychoanalyst?
Dr. Sandler: It's very difficult to say, but I don't think it made a substantial difference. It was certainly not worth the amount of work I put into it. I was never registered as a practicing physician.
Dr. Shane: Going back to your role as innovator in analysis, what do you think led to your particular kind of creativity?
Dr. Sandler: I think I have a good background as a scholar. I know my Freud and I can find my way about the analytic literature, and that gives a sense of security. Also, I don't owe allegiance to anybody. If one looks at a lot of analytic writing, one can see how people are scared of having new ideas that might make them seem disloyal to the group they are identified with. It often goes back to the question of whether they'll be approved of or not by their colleagues in their society or institute—will what they say affect their training analyst status, and so on. None of that was relevant in London, as far as I was concerned. I worked at the Hampstead Clinic with Anna Freud from 1956, and there were quite often disagreements, but we were friends. So it was not that big an issue when, in the early 60's, I criticized the classical energy theory. But Joffe and I gave a paper at a mid-Winter meeting on sublimation, and Loewenstein warned us that we'd be thrown out of the psychoanalytic movement because we had said we didn't need a theory of energy transformation. Although Hartmann was very nice about it all, a lot of people in New York were upset, and wrote to Anna Freud, but although there was a little tension at that time, she and I remained on good terms. So, you see, my career wasn't at stake.
Dr. Shane: But I guess the parameters were wide enough that you could …
Dr. Sandler: I think they're wider than they are in the United States. Even Anna Freud's views were not identical with those of the American ego psychologists. Sometimes she was very critical of them.
Dr. Shane: So you managed to retain a really good relationship with Anna Freud?
Dr. Sandler: With ups and downs.
Dr. Shane: There you were at the Hampstead Clinic, and you never went into child analysis?
Dr. Sandler: Well, I did this in child analysis, but I never practiced. However, I worked for years with child analysts at Hampstead.
Dr. Shane: Was your child analytic training at Hampstead.
Dr. Sandler: No, at the Institute. Now it's different, but at that time, if one were an analyst and one wanted to do the child training, it had to be done at the Institute. The Hampstead graduates didn't call themselves child analysts, they were “child therapists”. Now adult analysts who want to train in child analysis can do it at Hampstead. Two of my child cases were supervised by Hedwig Hoffer, who had been my first supervisor, and, in fact, my second analyst.
Dr. Shane: Mrs. Hoffer was your second analyst, and Willi Hoffer your first?
Dr. Sandler: Yes, it was a great experience because she could tell me where Willi went wrong!
Dr. Shane: With you?
Dr. Sandler: Yes. It was very helpful. Then my first wife died in 1955, and I married Anne-Marie in 1957. She was one of Anna Freud's Hampstead graduates and then went on to the Institute.
Dr. Shane: She's one of the many collaborators, the last I believe, you've written with.
Dr. Sandler: Yes, now that the kids are grown up, we do have more time to work together.
Dr. Shane: How does that work for you? Obviously, well enough.
Dr. Sandler: Working with a collaborator is very stimulating because one bounces ideas back and forth. I find discussion very fruitful. In the old days. I'd sit at the typewriter and we'd talk, and I'd put something down, and we'd disagree or agree. Now of course, it's the word processor. In fact, what I do now is I dictate what we agree on and my secretary types up the first draft, and then we both go over it and make big modifications.
Dr. Shane: Then you mainly see yourself as the person in the team who does the actual writing, the one who bounces the ideas off another person.
Dr. Sandler: In this respect, Wally Joffe was very important. I wrote a lot of papers with him before he died. He was very creative, and we used to argue a lot before anything went down on paper. Anne-Marie also has a phenomenal memory for clinical material, so that's useful, too.
Dr. Shane: What about Rosenblatt?
Dr. Sandler: Rosenblatt was the Secretary of a research group we had at Hampstead. It was called the Self-Esteem group. He took the minutes at the meeting, and we used those minutes to kick ideas around. We came up with one paper on which we collaborated—the one on the representational world.
Dr. Shane: Right, a very significant one.
Dr. Sandler: I think it was a very lucky choice of term.
Dr. Shane: It's quite evocative. Then there are your other collaborators. Dare and Holder.
Dr. Sandler: Right. We had to deliver a paper each month to the British Journal of Psychiatry, and worked under enormous pressure.
Dr. Shane: A paper a month?
Dr. Sandler: Yes. And they brought out a series, which we then put together as The Patient and the Analyst. Writing it was a nightmare.
Dr. Shane: What about writing alone?
Dr. Sandler: If I have a deadline.
Dr. Shane: Then you can do it?
Dr. Sandler: Yes, but I always turn to somebody else—to my wife or someone else—to go through it and see if it makes sense. I always get someone else to read the paper before I send it in.
Dr. Shane: One of the impressive things about you is that you're both a theoretician and a clinician. I would have thought it would require some leisure to think theoretically: yet, you're apparently able to gather a great deal of clinical material.
Dr. Sandler: One of the things I've rather resented is that I think I'm at least as good a clinician as a theoretician. Yet, people have said, “Well, he's a good theoretician; he can't be a good clinician.” It's always annoyed me.
Dr. Shane: Funny? Why?
Dr. Sandler: Because it was so overdone. He'd been told, I heard later, that we were attacking classical theory. I could never get his manuscript from him afterwards, but now the paper is often quoted. Working on the Hampstead Index was enormously stimulating. We'd be confronting clinical material with theoretical concepts and vice versa, and when there wasn't a good fit, new ideas were generated. I think this is an excellent research method in psychoanalysis. I mean the confrontation of theory with clinical material, trying to categorize it and get it to fit, and looking at where it doesn't fit. If you have a couple of lateral thinkers in the group—you really do need that—who don't owe allegiance to this or that Institute and whose professional status is not threatened, you have a wonderful research method. We've just done something very similar at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt with the concept of trauma. I go to Frankfurt regularly and work with a research group there. It's become clear that the concept of trauma is quite different in the minds of different analysts from what is described in the textbooks. And we've come out with some new formulations. But, to go back to the early 60s, the whole representational world notion developed, and the idea of object relationships suddenly clicked into place. One could put it into the main psychoanalytic theoretical model in terms of a wished-for relationship. In other words, one could combine the notion of the wish with the idea of a wished-for interaction with an object. But a wish doesn't have to be an instinctual wish. It can be a wish of any sort. We saw the object relationship as a valuing of the objects with whom one wants to have a relationship. So, suddenly, theoretically, it began to make sense. That looked like a shift to Greenberg and Mitchell who thought that I had moved to another track.
Dr. Shane: Moved away from drives?
Dr. Sandler: Away from drives, and this is true in the sense that I had been moving away from the idea of drives as the only source of unconscious wishes. If you have a narcissistic hurt, one can have a very forceful, omnipotent, wishful fantasy. It's not propelled by drives, but represents an attempt to do away with an unpleasant feeling. This involves the notion of the “child within”, rather than the more simplistic one of an id seeking discharge. What I mean is that there is a tendency to function as if you were a younger child, which brings the adult or older child into conflict. Then one makes a compromise. I take the view that every conflict we see on the couch is a conflict between something that was consciousness syntonic at one time and an opposing force which has made it dystonic. The work that we do in analysis allows the patient to become much more tolerant of the infantile, perverse, childish aspects of themselves. The aspects are not simply drives or drive-derivatives. They may be wishful fantasies propelled by anxiety or any other painful affect. They may be wishes to relate, in a particular way, to cling, whatever. So, by moving the notion of wish away from the purely drive wish, and saying that in every wish there is a wished-for relationship, one gets into the sphere of object relationships. So, Greenberg and Mitchell's idea that it was a “dual track” theory, that I was trying to have one foot in one camp and one foot in another, is not really correct, as I see it. They have condensed a whole development of thought.
Dr. Shane: Condensed?
Dr. Sandler: If one takes the later papers, it looks as if they're very different, but there is a historical continuity. So, I don't see that I've put forward a theory, but rather that I've assisted in the development of a theory. I have never wanted to put forward a rounded-out theory, nor to start a “school” in psychoanalysis, or anything like that, but when I see something I'm interested in and feel that I can contribute to the area, that's what I like to write about.
Dr. Shane: When you freed wish from drive and the economic point of view, then it certainly led the way to being able to emphasize the idea of wish more than discharge but instead the nature of the relationship.
Dr. Sandler: Right. But I don't think the economic point of view is identical with drive theory or with the theory of energy transformation. I think one can have an economics of feeling states.
Dr. Shane: Meaning?
Dr. Sandler: I mean, that if one feels bad about this and feels good about that, if there's more feeling good than bad, that will pull one in a particular direction. There's an economics of feeling states. I don't think the economic point of view is tied to drives. Most people seem to believe that, but it's not necessarily so. I think the economic point of view is important. And I don't think that I did the freeing of wish from drive.
Dr. Shane: No. But you certainly contributed.
Dr. Sandler: I hope so. I think this was a very important step.
Dr. Shane: I wonder—do you have any thoughts about the future of analysis? Do you have any thoughts about which way we're going to go?
Dr. Sandler: You mean the American Psychoanalytic? Don't tempt me.
Dr. Shane: Of course, I want to tempt you.
Dr. Sandler: I hope this court action is settled soon. But I think that it has been necessary to shake up the American, an Association which has held to a view about training non-medical analysts I can't identify with. I don't think any European can.
Dr. Shane: The notion that psychoanalysis and medicine are identical. So, one direction you see is inevitable here, and has already taken place in Europe: the inclusion of non-medical people for training at the American.
Dr. Sandler: Right. And another thing, I think we've got to turn our attention more to studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We are always the role model for psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists. And the fact is that most analysts are doing much more psychotherapy than they admit. I think a priority for research should be what people's concepts of the differences between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are because it's not clear.
Dr. Shane: But you don't relate analysis only to frequency?
Dr. Sandler: You can't relate it to any one criterion. I have had character cases in analysis where I didn't see much evidence of a workable transference. As analyst I was kept as a good figure, we could work on their outside relationships, but I could not get them out of that posture. One shouldn't interpret transference if it's not even unconsciously there.
Dr. Shane: Do you consider that analysis?
Dr. Sandler: I think transference is very important. I've got strong views about interpreting the transference first and foremost, and I think that a lot of analysts don't really interpret transference consistently or well. However, nobody really knows what is a transference neurosis, as distinct from other forms of transference. Furthermore, I don't think the Oedipus complex is the center of all pathology. As far as I am concerned, one asks what is going on with the patient.
Dr. Shane: What about other approaches to treatment, such as psychopharmacological agents? Do you see that as part of the future of psychoanalysis?
Dr. Sandler: You mean in combination? There's certainly a limited role. I remember the time when I was supervising someone who is now a very senior analyst. His patient was taking about one capsule of Librium a week — a very small dosage. She was doing very well, and the candidate eventually wanted to begin to terminate the analysis, but his own analyst said the woman was a drug addict, and that he shouldn't stop with her for that reason. I think that times have changed. There is a role, a very limited role, for tranquilizers, and so on. I think we must do anything that facilitates the analysis.
Dr. Shane: In terms of theorizing, in the future, do you see a superordinate theory, or do you see comparative analysis as Shafer describes it, or do you see an integration of theories, a broader base of theories for the clinician?
Dr. Sandler: We all know about the development of ego psychology, particularly in the United States. With the death of Hartmann, the lid blew off. Tension had accumulated because theory didn't fit actual practice. So, we had Kohut, for example. This was really important and necessary because people had been constricted and forced to hide what they were doing even from themselves. The gap between theory and practice was enormous, and is still too big. I think that we are waiting for somebody to come along to further narrow this gap. With the writings of Kohut, people were able to legitimize things they had been doing, essentially with character cases. The same sort of phenomenon, to a lesser degree, had happened earlier with Kurt Eissler's parameters. Deviations from “standard technique” became permissible so long as one got back to standard technique, so people breathed a sigh of relief because you can't adhere strictly to “standard” analysis. I think the gap between analytic theory and analytic practice is still enormous. We tend to teach two separate subjects in our Institutes. One of these is theory and the other is clinical practice. I think there is a dialectic in all this, and we are probably in what Thomas Kuhn would call a pre-revolutionary stage of development. We will have to wait until some genius comes along to reorganize things. But I don't think there has to be one model. Anna Freud used to say that one can have different frames of reference for different purposes, and we can move from one to the other.
Dr. Shane: So the combination of your scholarship and the fact that you felt independant freed you from the need to adhere to a particular mode of thinking?
Dr. Sandler: Well, technically, I am in what is called the “B” group in London [the name of the group has just been changed to the Contemporary Freudian group], the Freudian group, and I think I've always regarded myself as within that stream. The “B” group was Anna Freud's group. There are three groups in England, the “B” group being the smallest. That's a story in itself. In 1943, there were a series of discussions between the British analysts and the refugees who had come from Vienna—Anna Freud, the Hoffers, and so on. They couldn't agree on training, but they worked out a plan which allowed them to remain within the one society. There would be an “A” course run by the Kleinians and most of the British, and a “B” course run by the Viennese. Then, in addition to the “A” and “B” groups, a middle group gradually evolved. These were the “independents”, mostly object relations oriented. So now you've got the “A” group, and the “B” group, the independents (that is, the Freudians), who can't call themselves Freudians because if they do, everyone else shouts, “we are Freudians, too”. So, “B” group is the term used in England, and I was always within that.
Dr. Shane: My impression is that you're quite apt at both, which is unusual.
Dr. Sandler: I enjoy clinical work. The thing about theoretical ideas is that they tend, for the most part, to be preconscious. Then, when I'm talking in a group, they'll come out, and I'll be as surprised as the others.
Dr. Shane: That's the nature of creation.
Dr. Sandler: I don't spend time sitting down trying to think of a formulation. A lot will come out when I'm at the word processor. I may start off with something and be quite surprised at what evolves. When something's on my mind, preconsciously, I'm aware that my mind is working at it, and I tend to get quite abstracted.
Dr. Shane: You have apparently had an interesting as well as creative life. Besides living first in South Africa and then in England, you also lived in Israel. You held the first chair in psychoanalysis there, right?
Dr. Sandler: Yes, I was the first holder at the Hebrew University of the Sigmund Freud Chair of Psychoanalysis. I spent five years there, and then came back to London, partly because I was offered the Freud Memorial Chair at the University of London. Again, I was happy to be the first holder of the chair—there had only been one-year Freud Memorial Visiting Professorships before, which hadn't worked very well.
Dr. Shane: So that's why you left Israel?
Dr. Sandler: One of the reasons. The London appointment was a much bigger one. Also, what was difficult in Israel was that there was so much complicated administration. It was the Middle East, and the university was short of money. So, you had to watch your funds every day. There was trouble over the payment of bills for the Freud Centre, and so on, and I really didn't have time to do much work. In London, it's very different. If I need something, I call up and it's there the next week. But there was also the fact that our children and grandchildren wanted us to come back; Anna Freud wanted us both to come back. But in many ways we were very sad to leave Israel. It was a wonderful experience.
Dr. Shane: Well, there must have been some special pleasure in being the first holder of these chairs. Did you feel an identification with Sigmund Freud?
Dr. Sandler: I don't think so. I felt very honored, you know, very proud to have the appointment in Israel, and similarly, in London. In London, too, there was a special pleasure because I went back to my old college—going back to University College was a great pleasure for me. Also, I have the opportunity to work with my graduate students on their research. It takes a good deal of time, but it's a great source of pleasure, even when the students publish the collaborative work under their own names—as they should because they have their careers to make.
Dr. Shane: That's a very generous position. I've most often heard it the other way around, that a professor makes his reputation by getting the students to write and then appending his own name to it—and usually first. I imagine then there's lots of time spent with students?
Dr. Sandler: Yes, I have a seminar a week with my doctoral students. I teach at the psychoanalytic institute. And when I'm in my office at the university—I see my patients at home—they come in at any time, unless I have an appointment or a meeting.
Dr. Shane: How much of your time do you spend teaching and how much in practice?
Dr. Sandler: I'd say I do a fairly full-time academic job at the university, and the equivalent of halftime in analytic practice.
Dr. Shane: I wonder, do you have a great deal of energy?
Dr. Sandler: No. I don't have a large formal teaching load, and I can do a lot of thinking outside the university. I go in at about 10:30 in the morning and stay till about three, and go home to see a couple of patients. I see four analytic patients a day, plus some supervisions.
Dr. Shane: Looking at your own theoretical stance in psychoanalysis, are you aware that Greenberg and Mitchell consider you a mixed-model theorist?
Dr. Sandler: I think they got it quite wrong. I gather you want me to say something about the development of my thinking?
Dr. Shane: Yes, please.
Dr. Sandler: Well, in looking back, I've never had any conscious plan of how I would develop. I started out being very kosher, psychoanalytically. I talked and thought very much in terms of drive theory, but I always felt aware of the problem that object relations didn't fit well into classical theory. My earlier papers tended to be in that classical mode; particularly the one with Nagera in 1963 on fantasy. But I think in the Superego paper and in the Safety paper, both published in 1960, I was already talking about the importance of feeling states, but also still about energic cathexis. Looking back, I think I wasn't very happy about it, but my tendency has been to work theoretically from the inside outward. I mean that I would use the concepts that were available if I didn't have any others available, and then push in one or the other direction, rather than to put myself outside the main body of thought. It's sort of working away from within. And then in 1964, Joffe and I gave the paper on sublimation that I mentioned earlier. Joan Fleming was in the chair. It was an integrated meeting; I think Sidney Levin was supposed to give a paper afterwards, but Fleming let us go on for two hours. We
had all the big noises there, and they were, on the whole, very critical. And a year later, we gave a paper on persistence, which was later published in the Menninger Bulletin. To me it was a very important paper. And a senior colleague was put up to do a hatchet job. It was very funny.
Dr. Shane: What, in your mind, is the difference?
Dr. Sandler: I don't know. There is a difference, but I don't know how to pinpoint it exactly. There is a grey area. I can say that this is psychotherapy and this is analysis, but I can't always tell you on what basis the decision is reached. I think we should do research on that. It's not the number of times a week—you know, there are people in England who would say four times a week isn't enough. Many of the French will say
any frequency is enough in analysis, so long as the analyst functions like an analyst, and says very little and makes a few connections for the patient. I don't call that analysis.
Dr. Shane: Do you do that?
Dr. Sandler: I think, in fact, everyone does that, but they don't always recognize it.
Dr. Shane: Do you think Kohut brought a superordinate model?
Dr. Sandler: No, not at all. His theory was poor, but a number of the clinical and technical things he had to say were very important. His popularity has, I think, peaked, just as the ideas of Lacan have peaked.
Dr. Shane: What about research? What do you think in terms of research in the future?
Dr. Sandler: I don't think that research, the sort of laboratory research that's being done based on psychoanalytic theory, is worth a great deal if one looks at what it has produced for psychoanalysis. I think that research in psychoanalysis will be done through something rather like the Hampstead Index, with a constant confrontation of clinical material with theory. The aim of research is to improve the theory in relation to the tasks that we have to do. If I want to do research on termination, I would want to find out, first and foremost, what the notion of termination is in the minds of the psychoanalysts that I work with. I mentioned that we have done this with the idea of trauma. We found that our ideas vary enormously, not only between analysts, but within any one analyst. It is an “elastic” concept. I think we have to investigate our concepts, using the minds of analysts as our research material because analysts are the measuring instruments that we put into the analytical situation. They make preconscious connections and preconscious theories, organizations that they don't know about. If we can get these back into the open, and we have a good, stimulating group of productive thinkers kicking these things around, we can go much further. At least, this is the way I see it.
Dr. Shane: Well, I want to thank you for a most stimulating talk. It makes me want to go back and review your work.
Dr. Sandler: Well, it's all appearing soon in a Guilford Press book, From Safety to Superego.
Dr. Shane: This is a very timely interview then. Thank you, again.