Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D., a long-time IARPP Board Member, passed away at age 84 at the end of January of this year. His death is a huge loss to our profession. Mal was an irreplaceable force in our field, a fine, sensitive, warm, complex, loving, generous, and brilliant man. He contributed enormously to contemporary psychoanalytic developments and to relational and self-psychological psychoanalysis in particular.

Mal completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University and the Sorbonne and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1972. He was a consultant to the Harvard North Africa Project in Tunisia and Director of Training at the Tufts University Counseling Center from 1970 to 2000. He was a founder, president, faculty member, and supervisor at MIP, the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He served as a Board Director of IARPP and as an Emeritus Founding Member on the Council of IAPSP, the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He served as well on the teaching and supervising faculty of several other psychoanalytic institutes worldwide. Mal was also an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context.

His first book (with Daniel Kriegman) was The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and the Therapeutic Process (Guilford Press, 1992). He authored many psychoanalytic papers, most notably “Why the Analyst Needs to Change,” and was a frequent presenter at IARPP conferences across the decades. His writing explored how inner conflict, existential reality, and the innate capacity for creative imagination evolved as central features of the human condition; and how, in both analyst and patient, these aspects of our being animate a broadly relational psychoanalytic practice. Mal’s final book, The Story of Original Loss: Grieving Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2024) won the 2025 Gradiva Award in the category of Best Psychoanalytic Book shortly after his passing, a significant honor, bittersweet in its timing.

For those who knew him well, Mal’s prose reads as he spoke: lovely, lyrically, and attentively. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing Mal revered him as a deeply committed colleague and a thoughtfully engaged presence within our community. He contributed enormously to the contemporary psychoanalytic canon, and his ethical commitment and relational sensibility left a lasting mark on IARPP and on all those who worked alongside him. He leaves a big void in the communities of IARPP, IAPSP, and MIP, and in many other psychoanalytic communities across the globe. He will be greatly missed on the IARPP Board of Directors, where his dedication, hard work, and many contributions were invaluable. His voice and perspective helped shape our organization in meaningful ways. He shaped our field in lasting ways, and he also shaped so many of us personally through his presence, thinking, and generosity across decades.

In addition to his love and enjoyment of his professional work, Mal had a passion for landscape design, architecture, art, music, and poetry. He is survived by his wife Joyce, his children and their spouses, Anna (Ellis) and Sam (Bushra), his brother Dennis (Julia), as well as his grandchildren and extended family members. He will be dearly missed by friends, colleagues, students and patients throughout the world. With great sadness we mark the loss of an invaluable contributor to our field.

M.A.