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Roy Schafer

Publications and source records attributed to Roy Schafer.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

My life in testing.

This autobiographical essay describes my career as a psychodiagnostician, which began at the City College of New York in 1941 and ended in the late 1970s when I became a full-time psychoanalyst in Manhattan. As a green, 20-year-old psychology undergraduate, I was picked by Gardner Murphy to assist David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who was developing new methods for using psychological tests to diagnose and treat soldiers during World War II. Our findings were presented in the classic, two volume work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing, published in 1945-1946 (Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945-1946; 1968), to which I added two clinically enriched monographs: The Clinical Application of Psychological Tests, published in 1948 (Schafer, 1948/1995), and Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (Schafer, 1954), published in 1954. After the Menninger Clinic, I continued to hone my assessment expertise at the Austen Riggs Center and Yale University, but I also sought opportunities to develop psychotherapy skills. I completed psychoanalytic training in 1960 at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and thereafter sought positions that would offer more time for treating patients. A notable highpoint in my testing career was assessing Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. I look back fondly at my years as an assessment psychologist, which produced nearly 4 decades of great memories.

Forensic Psychiatry↗
PubMed2005

Conflict: conceptualization, practice, problems.

Although intrapsychic conflict has proved its usefulness as an organizing concept in both theoretical and clinical discourse, it should be regarded as a narrative choice, for there exist other useful ways to address the relevant phenomena. Ignoring the narrativity of intrapsychic conflict opens the way to simplistic and anthropomorphic psychoanalytic discourse. Technical difficulties may result. The author presents two relatively brief case summaries to illustrate the varied narratives used to describe intrapsychic conflict and its analysis.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Cordelia, Lear, and forgiveness.

Painful human interactions are often followed by urges to forgive, be forgiving, or seek forgiveness. The insight analysands develop into their transferences highlights their finding gratification in constantly reenacting painful interactions. Their new understanding can make forgiveness seem irrelevant; waiving the question of forgiveness might then seem the wiser course to follow. Also thrown into question is whether total forgiveness of self and others can ever be achieved. Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear raises these questions. There we encounter, first, the painful interaction of Cordelia and Lear and, finally, Cordelia's response, "No cause, no cause," to a dying Lear's begging her forgiveness for having initially treated her cruelly. Cordelia's response seems to be waiving the question of guilt and forgiveness, but could it be wholehearted? In a search for answers, a reading of Cordelia's and Lear's lines is interwoven with interpretations of unconscious conflict that might be considered were one to encounter clinically a "Cordelia" abused by an aging and failing father at a turning point in her womanly development. Unconsciously, it is concluded, unforgivingness persists alongside the loving, insightful waiving of forgiveness made possible by higher-level ego functioning. Methodological reflections on reading and interpretation are included.

Death↗
PubMed2005

Caring and coercive aspects of the psychoanalytic situation.

Certain ambivalent reactions to undergoing analysis add content and intensity to the analysand's transference and to some extent to the analyst's countertransference. A significant share of these reactions may be attributed to the structure of the psychoanalytic situation. Among other things, analysands' reactions feature fantasized and sometimes realistic experiences of being coerced by their analyst's counter-transferences. However, to achieve a clear view of these coercive experiences, they must be considered in relation to another, equally weighty structural feature: ambivalent reactions to the analyst's concerned care. Observation suggests that an intervention can be experienced, simultaneously or sequentially, as both coercive and caring, and that, when analyzed, each of these experiences is usually found to be saturated with mixed feelings.

Coercion↗
PubMed2002

Defenses against goodness.

This paper examines the fantasies and conflicts of analysands who avoid the experience and expression of positive reactions to the goodness of others and who hide feelings that would elicit that goodness. Envious wishes to spoil good objects, attachments to bad objects, defenses against gratitude and dependence, negative therapeutic reactions, and other such conflictual developments can help forestall depressive anxiety in these analysands. They dread abandoning narcissistic, omnipotent, sadomasochistic, and persecutory paranoidschizoid positions, and fear moving toward the mature depressive position, with its burdens of seemingly intolerable guilt, concern, felt ambivalence, and vulnerability to humiliation and disappointment.

Adult↗