Anne-Marie Sandler, 1998 (1925-2018)
Anne-Marie Sandler’s exceptional contributions to psychoanalysis were wide-ranging and enduring, spanning theoretical and clinical domains, individual and collaborative endeavors, and significant institutional leadership. Her collaboration with her husband, Joseph Sandler, culminating in Internal Objects Revisited (1998), produced what has been described as a virtual textbook of contemporary psychoanalytic theory — synthesizing and updating object relations thinking in a way that was accessible and clinically grounded. Anna-Marie Sandler’s 1963 paper on blind children has been described as an outstanding example of integrating complexity in the methodology of psychoanalytic investigation was quietly anticipatory, implicitly foreshadowing what would become Internal Objects Revisited.
Sandler’s leadership roles — directing the Anna Freud Centre, presiding over both the British Psychoanalytical Society and the European Psychoanalytic Federation, and serving as Vice-President of the IPA — gave her unusual reach and influence across the international psychoanalytic community.
In 1997, after many difficulties, Sandler contributed to the creation within the IPA of a Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis (COCAP) — a very important step for child analysis being recognized and developed in psychoanalytic societies worldwide. Thanks to her energy, child analysis is now integrated in most analytic trainings.