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In this volume, Roy Schafer continues his masterful effort of transducing from the literary to the psychoanalytic. Conceptions of literary criticism are persuasively demonstrated as illuminating psychoanalytic theory. Although the current volume professes to continue the development of what Schafer calls action language, we find new emphases arising from application of discourse theory, perspectivism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, constructionism, poststructuralism, and other postmodern systems. This is all to the good. The migration outward of literary criticism to new territories, including psychoanalysis, is welcome.
Once Schafer acknowledges at the outset his debt to Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others, he then provides little additional crediting of basic notions originated by these thinkers. This is unfortunate. We are left with a pastiche of powerful ideas, only partially integrated, directed toward endowing clinical experience with new comprehension. In this latter effort, Schafer is only modestly successful.
In his poststructuralist revision of Freud's psychoanalysis, Schafer emphasizes an important new place for discourse. For example, applying these principles, Schafer notes that all speaking and writing is subject to rhetorical analysis—including Freud's writing. “Much of the psychoanalytic literature is written in a drab style. I suggest that this style is a specialized and conventionalized rhetorical attempt to be persuasive. It attempts to be persuasive by creating an image of the writer as a reliable member of the Old Enlightenment: “a neutral, value-free, countertransference-free, well-trained scientific observer; a genderless, raceless, classless expert” (p. 150). Nevertheless, as Schafer contends, Freud's breathtaking contribution was in establishing a new form for dialogue in which essential intrapsychic storylines can be narrated rather than unthinkingly reenacted