Psychoanalysis lost one of its giants when Roy Schafer died on 5 August 2018 at the age of 95.
Roy was educated at the City College of New York (B.A.), the University of Kansas (M.A.) and Clark University (Ph.D.), and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute. He was an influential presence in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking for more than seven decades. He was only 23 years old when, with David Rapaport and Merton Gill, he co-authored the seminal Diagnostic Psychological Testing, and he had published two more important books about testing by the time he was 32. His focus shifted, in its object more than in its vision, to psychoanalytic theory beginning with “Generative Empathy in the Treatment Situation” (1959), and he produced 11 more books and more than 70 papers over the course of 54 years.
Roy was intellectually restless; he constantly probed the limits—and the limitations—of received theory, including the theories within which he was working at any moment. Trained in the ego psychological tradition under the strict mentorship of Rapaport, his first psychoanalytic book, Aspects of Internalization (1968), was anchored in an emended version of mainstream theory. But eight years later, breaking decisively with the ideas of the man to whom he referred in a poem (Roy wrote poetry throughout his life) as “tyrannical critic, unstinting benefactor,” he wrote the provocative and groundbreaking A New Language for Psychoanalysis (1976), in which he argued that a metapsychology relying on concepts of force and structure was inappropriate to a discourse designed to explore meaning, intention, choice, and action.
In later years Roy was drawn to and embraced the work of contemporary Kleinian thinkers, Betty Joseph, Michael Feldman, John Steiner, and Ron Britton among others. This final turn seemed anomalous and even shocking; to many, it appeared that he had turned his back on his ego psychological roots; Rapaport, after all, had characterized Klein’s object relations theory as an “id mythology.” But Roy, narrating the story of his professional evolution as seen through his own eyes, insisted that there was continuity in his sensibility from beginning to end, despite shifts of emphasis and interest. He compared the contemporary Kleinian focus on unconscious fantasy and attempts to actualize it in the transference—and the countertransference—to his own emphasis on narration and action. Strikingly, he saw the Kleinians’ exquisite attention to the here and now in treatment as similar to his own early appreciation of interaction in the testing situation as a source of information about the patient’s psychodynamics; this modification and expansion of technique drew Rapaport’s criticism.
Unusual for the time and rarer still today, Roy drew on a range of conceptual tools that guided his never-ending critique of his own thinking and that of others. Throughout his career he was engaged with philosophers (especially philosophers of mind such as Austin, Ryle, and Wittgenstein), with literary critics and perhaps especially with writers of and commentators on tragedy; his last book, Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis (2009), reflects an interest and a commitment that shaped his thinking for a half-century or more. The central themes of his work—active engagement with the environment, the weaving of personal narrative, the assumption of an irreducible if often disavowed personal agency—are profoundly Freudian, but also converge elegantly with thinking born in disciplines other than psychoanalysis.
But despite the grand intellectual edifice that Roy’s erudition brought to the work, he was always also a clinician at heart. Never interested in theory principally for theory’s sake, his wrenching break from Rapaport was motivated by his realization that developing metapsychology in the way the ego psychologists had lost touch in a fundamental way with the clinical project that had inspired Freud and others to create a theory of mind in the first place. And, by bringing the ideas of others into conversation with psychoanalysts, Roy was demonstrating his conviction that specialists in a range of humanistic disciplines are dealing with common themes, and that all have something to contribute to our efforts to help our analysands to live more effectively.
I have mentioned that Roy wrote poetry; it was a lifelong interest of his, and in his last years poetry was all that he wrote. In 2012 he self-published a small book of selected poems written over the previous 62 years. The poems tend to be dark; a darkness that colours but that never obscures the beauty and the pleasure that life has to offer.
Overall, Roy’s poems serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone, offering us a glimpse of the ways in which his formal writings translate his personal experience. In a poem about time titled “The Thief” he writes:
We’re good with words:
We say we keep time
though it’s never been ours to keep;
we say we steal and do time
forgetting that time is the thief;
it’s what time does to us.
Two themes, perhaps the most central in Roy’s massive body of work, are captured in this stanza. First, the ironic “We’re good with words,” conveying the way that we constantly, and tendentiously, defensively, often self-deceptively, narrate our experience. And second, central to the experience that we are continuously challenged to narrate is the indominable hegemony of time. “Time is the thief” because it moves forward inexorably and there are no “do-overs.” This is an essential aspect of what Roy in his paper “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Reality” (1970), certainly one of his greatest and one which underlies much of what was mattered most to him throughout his life, called the “tragic vision.” Consider the way he wrote about time in that paper:
The tragic sense of time is linear rather than
cyclic: time is seen to be continuous and irreversible;
choices once made are made forever; a second chance
cannot be the same as the first; life is progression
towards death without rebirth; rebirth is an illusion … .
The tragic vision, often misunderstood, must not be confused with despair. Roy knew that this can be a danger, but that succumbing to the confusion undermines our appreciation of the richness that life offers. In another poem he describes the “melancholy joy” that he shares with Mozart as he listens to the composer’s music. The words, reminding us that there is no joy without melancholy and no melancholy without joy, tell us a great deal about Roy’s sense of himself and also about the vision that underlies his clinical and theoretical contribution. It is a vision that is difficult to hold onto—and one that is increasingly challenged in today’s digital world—but one that is essential if psychoanalysis is to have any deeply personal meaning and any deeply transformative potential.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with Roy a couple of years ago. We were talking about the way his work was received; he was well aware that his ideas were both conceptually difficult and provocative. He described giving a talk in front of a large audience, saying that he was aware that only a handful of people seemed to be fully following him or even listening carefully. It was, I could tell, a melancholy experience; Roy was both far too committed to his ideas and far too ambitious to discount public reaction to what he had to say. But at the same time he was energized by what he saw—both by the indifference and by the enthusiasm of those he had touched. Roy’s face brightened as he told the story; he seemed for a moment to become a young man or even a boy embracing a deeply personal and passionate vision to which he would dedicate his life. Recalling one instance of something that had happened many times he said “We have to do it, because it’s important!”
To me, that captures Roy’s sensibility; he knew that his work—and life itself—is difficult, but that living generatively depends on not allowing the difficulty to blind us to the importance of the lives we create. It is what allowed him to be so productive for so many years, and to give so much to those who engage the work he has left us.
Roy’s wife, Rita Frankiel, died in 2007. He is survived by three daughters with his first wife: Laura Schafer, Amy Schafer Boger, and Sylvia Schafer, and by five grandchildren.