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In an effort to understand and illuminate problematic aspects of the treatment relationship, in particular transference and countertransference enactments, Roy Schafer painted a forceful and dramatic Kleinian portrait of patients' unconscious attempts to alter and distort their analysts' memories, to “colonize” them, an action he likened to that of a foreign invasion. Such attempts, which may be considered as a form of projective identification, seem to operate in treatment situations where patients present themselves as hopeless failures and “therapeutic washouts” in an effort to avoid working through conscious painful experience as well as facing up to the complexities inherent in a two-person, “l-Thou” relationship. Should the analyst collude in this endeavor, treatment impasse is likely, as well as patient regression to a “paranoid-schizoid,” or early “depressive” position of narcissistic omnipotence, sadistic interaction, and boundary fragmentation in self and object representation.
Shafer takes as his objective correlative the literary and spiritual posture of Franz Kafka, with its emphasis on blackness, hopelessness, and most important, the “fervor” to be remembered and recalled as barren, sterile, hopeless, and ruined. He notes that patients not only present themselves in this light, but in a subtle and manipulative fashion try to shape and color their analysts' remembrances of them as failures. However, Shafer observes that patients tend to shift in and out of their black roles, and the same shift is apparent in the analysts' countertransference reactions. As in previous papers, he stresses the need to an even-handed neutrality that avoids the transferential “trap” of judging achievement, but rather is able to decipher the dyadic reactions to changing accounts of success and failure, and to analyze patients' polarized conceptions as a defensive maneuver to avoid taking responsibility for their own lives. It is this lack of responsibility, he states, that ass