The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013 Volume LXXXII, Number 1
ROY SCHAFER : A BEG INNING
By Henry P. Schwartz
The author provides a biographical overview of Schafer’s life, culled from his published work and focused primarily on his professional development. This biography is used to demonstrate some of Schafer’s central theoretical insights on narrativity and language, and reveals the consistency of his thinking over his long career. A brief discussion of his writing on King Lear provides a bridge between theoretical and biographical material.
Keywords: Roy Schafer, history of analysis, philosophy, ego psychology,King Lear, creation of experience, creation of facts, language,narration, forgiveness, love.
There is no correct introduction I can give to Roy Schafer. What I can do is tell my version of that story, a story that implies an interpretation, and in doing that I will also tell something about the storyteller. That is the part for you the reader to figure out, and as you figure it out, you will become another storyteller and interpreter of this “beginning.”
We have all read his books and papers, and I will provide a very brief overview in a moment. Before getting to that, however, let me tell you some of his tellings of himself as a person.
“Where to begin?” he once asked, then continued as follows.
Perhaps with the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe and then my parents’ wretched childhoods and emigration to the United States, carrying with them poverty-tainted ideals of learning and little emotional preparation for gratifying family life; this leading to a childhood that featured more than enough bad times emotionally and an adolescence overshadowed by the sense of futility and pessimism engendered in the 1930s by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the massive discrimination against and persecution of Jews—all of which together fostered the deep feelings, “What’s wrong with people?” and “What’s wrong with me?” Under the influence of these feelings I adopted the role of cautious observer, outsider, and interpreter of what people said and did as well as doubter of the meaning and validity of my own ideas and feelings. It was in this soil that there grew my lifelong interest in interpretation, and it is the intensity of this interest that I consider the red thread running through my personal life, my occupational skills, and the development of my ideas about psychoanalysis. [2000, p. 33]
In another paper, he goes on:
In 1943, fresh out of the City College of New York, I was recruited by David Rapaport, then Chief Psychologist at the Menninger Clinic, to be his intern-apprentice-research assistant. Our clinical work was in diagnostic psychological testing using a battery of tests, and our research (with Merton Gill as our psychiatric consultant on diagnosis) focused on test differences among different diagnostic groups of patients, and between them and “normals.” Gill and Margaret Brenman were then advanced candidates at, or recent graduates of, the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute; they were doing research on hypnotherapy. By 1946, Rapaport was established as the head of a new Research Department, and I had been chosen to take his place as Chief of Adult Testing. [2006, p. 1]
But in no time Austen Riggs began recruiting staff from Menninger, and along with Robert Knight, Rapaport, Brenman, and Gill, Schafer moves to Riggs in ’47 and begins an analysis with Knight. Of this analysis, he says:
My analysis (1947–1949) had been short, inadequate, and, I now think, entirely inappropriate, in that my analyst had been Robert Knight, my boss at Riggs, and the analysis was conducted within the confined professional atmosphere at Riggs. Despite its disruptive factors and limitations, that two-year “analysis” was accepted as my training analysis. It barely met the minimum requirement of 300 hours in duration, and it had never before been considered a training analysis. [2006, p. 2]