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OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST DECADE, Roy Schafer has been evolving a critique and reassessment of psychoanalytic thinking and theory which raises profoundly important questions about the basic options available to psychoanalysis. Schafer's reassessment of psychoanalysis has evolved through a series of penetrating articles culminating in his book A New Language for Psychoanalysis(1976).
Schafer's criticisms go to the heart of psychoanalytic methodology, so that they must inevitably provoke a thoughtful and searching reassessment of the process of psychoanalytic conceptualization. The basic question is whether Schafer's action language is in effect a theoretical option, as he proposes it, or, alternatively, whether it offers a sophisticated linguistic convention concerned more with data description and therapeutic communication than with theoretical formulation.
The difficulties to which Schafer's argument addresses itself have to do with the use of a natural-science approach and model in psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing. The natural-science model operates by inferring entities, structures, processes, and other properties and qualities of the object of investigation as means for explaining and making intelligible the observable regularities in the external data of the object of investigation.