Here is the long-awaited new book by the influential, always provocative psychoanalyst, Roy Schafer. It focuses on a vacuum that has developed between psychoanalysis and critical thinkers in the social sciences and humanities. Schafer's goal is to weave psychoanalytic discourse into the tapestry of modern trends in intellectual history, notably linguistic and hermeneutic approaches to interpretation.The manner in which we ”narrate” our lives is the central theme of psychoanalytic discourse and a critical issue for all of us, Roy Schafer argues. Narrating, giving an account, presenting a version: these terms make up the core vocabulary of the narrative approach. From this perspective, Schafer offers a new understanding of such diverse issues as men's struggle against sentimentality; women and power; happiness and failure; and analysts' sublimated love for their patients.Whether he's redefining the self, reinterpreting Freud, or counteracting the stereotype of the aloof, authoritarian, and patriarchal analyst, Schafer's rich observations will inform and stimulate not only analysts but all those interested in psychoanalytic thought as an intellectual current of our times.
Insight and interpretation, the crucial tools of psychoanalytic process, are no longer treated with the respect they deserve. In psychoanalytic literature the focus has shifted towards the effects of countertransference and its role in the relationship between patient and analyst. By the same token, the equally important question of the analyst's neutrality is regularly misunderstood and discredited. Roy Schafer explains, in his typically lucid and even-handed approach, how these new shifts in contemporary psychoanalysis have often resulted in conceptual imbalance and erratic technique. His goal, however, is not to reject these recent contributions but rather to integrate them into a more cohesive understanding of the psychoanalytic process. He powerfully demonstrates how unconscious and archaic fantasies inform the patient’s narrative. Factors such as invasion of the mind, threat punishment, seduction, control, envy, withdrawal, and evasion can find expression through the transference. Interpretation of the transference, in turn, provides the patient with the insight of what it means to understand and be understood, and why it so often threatening. Therefore, when these fantasies are played out in the countertransference, they become a tool for furhter elucidation of these unconscious fantasies that underlie the anlaytic relationship.
The analytic attitude" ranks as one of Freud's greatest creations. Both the findings of psychoanalysis as a method of investigation and its results as a method of treatment depend on its being consistent to a high degree. Yet Freud offered no concise, complex, generally acceptable formulation of what it is: his ideas, or a version of them, can only be derived from his papers on technique. Taking these ideas as a starting point, and with due regard to the contributions of other analysts over the years, the author rises to the challenge of defining the "ideal" attitude that he come to aspire to in his work as an analyst. To this end the author discusses not only the analyst's empathy, the need to establish an "atmosphere of safety" in relation to the dangers the patient perceives when facing the possibility of insight and personal change, but also the concepts of transference and resistance, and the nature of psychoanalytic interpretation and reconstruction.
This is a collection of published and unpublished papers on clinical, theoretical and applied aspects of psychoanalysis that take up various aspects of unconscious mental processes and conflicts and their expression in the clinical transference and countertransference. These expressions are evidenced in frustration, gratitude and benevolence, competing feelings of being cared for and coerced, disturbed and expanded bodily pleasure, cruelty and forgiveness. Included in this book is a brief history of the author's odyssey through several major contributions regarding the language of psychoanalysis and its narrativity, and the convergence of these with contemporary Kleinian modes of thought.
Everyone experiences "bad" feelings - guilt, shame, humiliation, envy and more. Yet despite the fact that such emotions are a common occurrence, these painful feelings are often labelled as wrong, a moralistic determination that can complicate existing problems in the individual's emotional life. Through careful research and assessment of psychoanalytical methods, this book offers a new understanding of how painful emotional states can find relief through the talking cure.
This book traces a line of continuity in psychoanalysis back to Freud and his immediate followers, and describes the major transformations that followed, particularly in the works of Heinz Hartmann and the ego psychologists, and Hanna Segal and the contemporary Kleinians of London.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Part I Insight and Its Vicissitudes -- Introduction to Part I -- 1 Insight into Insight -- 2 Insight for Whom? -- 3 Insight: Seeing or Telling? -- 4 Remembering in the Countertransference -- 5 Intimate Neutrality -- Part II Applications -- Introduction to Part II -- 6 Interpreting Sex -- 7 Psychoanalytic Discourse on Male Nonnormative Sexuality and Perversion -- 8 Gender Jokes/Sexual Politics -- Part III An Overview -- Introduction to Part III -- 9 Knowing Another Person Psychoanalytically -- References -- Index
Should be of considerable interest to a wider public, since it proposes a radical reformulation of psychoanalytical theory which, if accepted, would render outmoded almost all the analytical jargon that has crept into the language of progressive, enlightened post-Freudian people.-Charles Rycroft, The New York Review of Books Schafer's arguments have considerable cogency. The tendency to over-theorize so that the translation of abstractions into the language of ordinary discourse between analyst and patient has become increasingly difficult is a fault; Schafer goes a long way towards redressing it, and his efforts to include meaning and the person in the form of his language is an achievement.-Michael Fordham, The Times Higher Education Supplement
This work has introduced generations of clinical psychologists to psychoanalysis as well as to methods of psychodynamic interpretation that has served them well in their entree to clinical practice.
In this book, Roy Schafer offers a radical reconceptualization of Freudian metapsychology. When Freud wrote about his discoveries of the unconscious and the nature of psychic processes, he used the language of the prevailing scientific theories of his time -- energy, force, and mechanism. In contrast, Schafer sees psychoanalysis as an interpretive discipline, a human science that requires a language of its own, unencumbered by the old natural science concepts. Schafer proposes a new language for psychoanalysis, freed from the ambiguities and biases of mechanistic theory. His formulation is based on the notion of action, were "action" is understood to mean the widest variety of human behavior: perceiving, organizing, fantasying, wishing, and doing -- consciously and unconsciously. -- Description of the source book.
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