ABSTRACT
Sixteen years ago, as I was writing a review of Joseph and Ann-Marie Sandler’s (1998) book, Internal Objects Revisited, Joseph Sandler died and my essay took on the flavour of an obituary. I felt compelled to go beyond the confines of a book review and to survey the milestones of this distinguished psychoanalyst’s career. I began this portion of my writing with the following sentence: “Joseph Sandler’s contributions to psychoanalysis are wide-ranging and, with shameless brevity, can be summarized under four categories” (Akhtar, 1999a, p. 533). Curiously, the phrase “shameless brevity” became a source of literary pride for me over time. But was I being really shameless? Or, was the ironic mea culpa a lexical veil to cover up the shame over what, of necessity, was a cursory treatment of someone’s profound and vast oeuvre? In other words, was seeming shamelessness hiding shame? And, what is shamelessness anyway?
