Joseph J. Sandler (10 January 1927 – 6 October 1998) was a British psychoanalyst within the

Anna Freud Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contribut ...

Grouping – now the Contemporary Freudians – of the

British Psychoanalytical Society The British Psychoanalytical Society was founded by the British neurologist Ernest Jones as the London Psychoanalytical Society on 30 October 1913. It is one of two organizations in Britain training psychoanalysts, the other being the British ...

; and is perhaps best known for what has been called his 'silent revolution' in re-aligning the concepts of the object relations school within the framework of

ego psychology Ego psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind. An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical c ...

.Otto F. Kernberg, 'The Influence of Joseph Sandler's Work on Contemporary Psychoanalysis'
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Life

Born and educated in South Africa, including a medical degree, Sandler moved to London following fears around his anti-apartheid stance, where he completed his PhD in psychology at

University College, London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

in 1950, before further training in medicine and psychoanalysis. He became a training analyst in 1955. Sandler was editor of the ''International Journal of Psycho-Analysis'' from 1969 to 1978; and was elected President of the

International Psychoanalytical Association The International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, from an idea proposed by Sándor Ferenczi. His ...

in 1989. Sandler was married to fellow psychoanalyst

Anne-Marie Sandler Anne-Marie Sandler (December 15, 1925 – July 25, 2018) is a Swiss-born British psychologist and psychoanalyst noted for her clinical observation of the relationship dynamic between blind infants and their mothers in a project spearheaded by A ...

and was father to three children. Sandler was the first Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University, requested by Anna Freud and funded in large part by American psychoanalysts. He stayed for five years, and also raised research funds for a Center. As an MD and Ph.D., he insisted that the Chair be placed directly reporting to the Dean of Social Sciences, given the long-standing animosity within the Psychology Department (as documented, for instance in Kahnemann's book on his and Twersky's experiences as students there prior to Sandler). After Sandler, the Freud Chair was filled by various prominent visiting Professors, including Al Solnit (Yale Child Study Center), Sid Blatt (Yale Psychology) and Bennet Simon (Harvard). Then, Shmuel Erlich occupied the position for some years. After Erlich, the Chair remained vacant and no search was performed. During Erlich's term, the Psychoanalytic Research Funds were separated from the Chair of Psychoanalysis and no longer produced published research in psychoanalysis. Nathan Szajnberg was invited by the President of the University to fill the position (2007-2010). During Szajnberg's term, he produced three books on development and psychoanalysis ("Lives Across Time" (a 30-year study of infant development with H. Massie); "Reluctant Warriors" (on elite Israeli soldiers) and "Sheba and Solomon's Return" (on Ethiopian children and families in Israel). The Freud Chair is no longer occupied by a psychoanalyst.

Theoretical openness

Sandler took an open, pragmatic approach to psychoanalytic theorising – something particularly important in the wake of the Controversial discussions which had left a three-way split inside the British Society. He took the view that 'we have ''a body of ideas'', rather than a consistent whole, that constitutes psychoanalytic theory', and called for 'a greater degree of tolerance of concepts...created by people who have a different psychoanalytic background' – something that was of great importance in his rapprochement between Kleinian ideas and ego psychology.

Safety

Sandler emphasised early in his work (1959) the importance of the feeling of safety, which he linked to early experiences of primary

narcissism Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others. Narcissism exists on a co ...

' He noted however that the search for safety could act as a resistance in psychotherapy; but also highlighted the role of a sense of trust in forging the

therapeutic alliance A therapeutic alliance, or working alliance, is a partnership between a patient and his or her therapist that allows them to achieve goals through agreed-upon tasks. The concept of therapeutic alliance dates back to Sigmund Freud. Over the cour ...

Role responsiveness and actualisation

Sandler introduced the term actualisation into

psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

from literary studies, to cover the process whereby past object-relationships are brought to life within the analytic setting. Through what he termed the free-floating (if controlled and moderated) 'role responsiveness' of the therapist, the latter was able to bring into being the unconscious fantasy of the patient and so expose it to light – becoming in the process someone a little different with each patient.Patrick Casement, ''Further Learning from the Patient'' (1990) p. 118-9 Sandler himself saw the process of actualisation as adumbrated in the 7th chapter of Freud's ''

The Interpretation of Dreams ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (german: Die Traumdeutung) is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation, and discusses what w ...

''; and similar concepts can be found in ego psychology, which speaks of the 'evocation' of a proxy and among post-Jungians with their talk of a 'complementary'

countertransference Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client. Early formulations The phenomenon of countertransference (german: G ...

. Sandler's concept also connects with the ideas of

acting out In the psychology of defense mechanisms and self-control, acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexua ...

and

acting in "Acting in" is a psychological term which has been given various meanings over the years, but which is most generally used in opposition to acting out to cover conflicts which are brought to life inside therapy, as opposed to outside. One commentat ...

within the analytic session, though

Otto Kernberg Otto Friedmann Kernberg (born 10 September 1928) is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. I ...

emphasises specifically how Sandler differentiated actualisation from acting out. Sandler specifies several different types of actualisation, including delusive actualisation and symbolic actualisation. The concept of role responsiveness has subsequently been taken up more widely in British psychoanalysis, as well as by intersubjective analysts, who see at least one aspect of countertransference as the therapist's reaction to the role the patient wishes to force upon them.

Example

A clear example of actualisation described shortly ''before'' Sandler's introduction of the term tells how, in an analytic encounter with a young man, one psychoanalyst – David Cooper – had "felt the progressive extrusion of his internalized mother into me, not as a theoretical construct but in actual experience".

On psychotherapy

Sandler considered that psychotherapy could in homely terms be thought of as a process of 'making friends' with unacceptable parts of oneself. His willingness to look beyond dogmatic theorising and to take on board the normal as well as the abnormal in psychotherapeutic assessment helped facilitate the bridging role he played within the often fragmented world of postmodern psychotherapies.P. Fonagy et al, ''Psychoanalysis on the Move: the work of Joseph Sandler'' (1999) p. 44-7

References

External links

New York Times, 'Joseph J. Sandler...Leading British Psychoanalyst
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sandler, Joseph J 1927 births 1998 deaths British psychoanalysts Object relations theorists