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An instructive way of characterizing Joseph Sandler ’s work and legacy is to quote the words with which Otto Kernberg opened and closed his contribution to the monographic issue of the North American journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry dedicated to him in 2005. Kernberg wrote: “I believe it is fair to say that Joseph Sandler has contributed more than anybody else to the integration of classical ego psychology with contemporary object relations theory, at both the theoretical and the clinical level” (Kernberg 2005, p. 174). Peter Fonagy and Mary Target provide the summary and overview of Joseph Sandler’s main concepts in their 2003 handbook, Psychoanalytic Theories: Perspectives from Developmental Psychopathology, following the discussion of the developmental models of Anna Freud and Margaret Mahler. The publications of Sandler to which Fonagy and Target included are, among others: “The background of safety” (1960a; also in Sandler,1987), “The concept of superego” (1960b; also in Sandler 1987), “Countertransference and role- responsiveness” (1976), “On the development of object relationships and affects” (with Anne- Marie Sandler 1978), “The past unconscious, the present unconscious, and interpretation of the transference” (with Anne-Marie Sandler 1984), and “On the structure of internal objects and internal objects relationships” (1990). Although the work of Joseph Sandler has been well received and widely assimilated throughout Europe, for example in Italy and Germany, it is possible that many colleagues work ego psychologically without realizing it. ‘Hartmann’s Ego Psychology’ may have never occupied a central role among the analytic perspectives which characterized Italian psychoanalysis in the 1950s -1980s (Conci 2019). However, ever since 1990’s, Stefano Bolognini (2004, 2011) has been developing series of theoretical and clinical conceptualizations stemming from both North American Ego Psychology and Self Psychology (Conci 2019). Bolognini developed the concept of the relationship between the Ego and the Self of an individual as a condensed intrapsychic functional equivalent of the mother-infant primary relationship: “The Ego tends to treat the Self more or less the same way the mother treated (in a very general, but above all psychic, sense) her own child.” (Bolognini 2019, p. 115). Correspondingly, he paid special attention to the many situations of serious suffering of the Self, where the functioning of the Ego is often altered: “regressed, intoxicated, projectively distorting reality, darkened and deprived of hope, persecutorily besieged”, etc. (Bolognini 2019, p.118). Overall, in Bolognini’s writings, both Ego and Self condition each other in a mutual way , so that in analysis the Ego and the Self of both analyst and patient interact continuously, with ubiquitous unconscious alternations between prevailing of the “Analysis with the Ego” or the “Analysis with the Self” (Bolognini, 2004). Another author who contributed to the resurgence of the Contemporary Ego Psychology worldwide is Cecilio Paniagua (1991, 2008, 2014), who has earned medical degree in Spain, lives and practices in Madrid, and has trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis
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