CRITICA

Dear PINC Members,

I am writing to share the sad news that Susan Sands passed just a couple of weeks ago. She was a loved, esteemed, and profoundly impactful member of PINC. Susan contributed to PINC and the broader analytic community in many ways over many years, as an instructor/faculty member, consultant, committee chair member, board member, author, and researcher. She was intelligent, creative, playful, hard working, and inspiring to many. This is conveyed in the PINC Listserv comments from many of you who have shared your memories and appreciation there. In addition to those sentiments, a couple of PINC members (Patricia Hart and Melissa Holub) spent time collecting words about Susan and have been in contact with her husband. The following tribute comes from that community effort.

Susan was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but her family moved back to Evanston, Illinois, when she was very young. Susan went to college at Cornell and then to Yale, where she received her MA in English. From there, she moved to New York City, where she worked for a time as a researcher and was part of the now-famous strike of women who were prevented from being journalists. She then moved to Berkeley and worked for KQED until she pursued a psychology degree. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley and later became an Assistant Clinical Professor there. In the early 1980s, she worked at Judith Wallerstein’s big project, The Center for the Family in Transition, a privately funded institute involved in research and treatment for divorcing and remarrying parents and their children. After that, Susan teamed up with Deborah Stern to become experts in treating cocaine addiction. Along her unfolding path, she was introduced to Kohut and began reading and studying his work. Her understanding of Kohut was a major first step in developing an illustrious career of supervising, consultation, teaching, writing, and treating. Additionally, Susan was hired by Stanford in their Resilience project to research the treatment of pain. She was later recruited into their eating disorders program, where she developed a deep professional interest and expertise in the treatment of eating disordered patients. Susan had many passions outside of her work. She was a lifelong singer, reader, animal lover, world traveler, and loving mother. Susan contributed so much to the field and PINC, through her many published articles, her recent, wonderful and well-received book on aging, her teaching and consulting, her work on the Nominations committee, and her leadership in the Freudiennes.

Some of Susan’s publications include:

Inside the Body: How the Science of Interoception Can Provide a New Understanding of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 2023
The Inside Story: The Surprising Pleasures of Living in an Aging Body, book published in  2022
On the Royal Road Together: The Analytic Function of Dreams in Activating Dissociative Unconscious Communication, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, August 2010
Less Time Ahead, More Behind: Being a Psychotherapist in the Last Third of Life, Women & Therapy, April 2009