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These extremely readable books by Roy Schafer address the major conceptual and technical problems encountered by adult psychoanalysts. They are excellent introductions to the field for the beginning analyst, while also providing seasoned analysts a concise and cogent review of the central themes of this prolific analytic writer's professional interests: ego psychology, unconscious fantasy, internalization, action language, narrative and story, and his recent explication of the neo-Kleinian perspective—all within a hermeneutic framework.
Insight and Interpretation is divided into three sections. The first, Insight and Its Vicissitudes, devotes its first three chapters to exploring the nature of insight. Here I found myself intrigued that Schafer, whose analytic roots extend deeply into the ego psychology tradition, immediately takes up Betty Joseph's landmark article, “On Understanding and Not Understanding” (1983), in which she explores the various meanings that analysands unconsciously attribute to insight. Schafer elucidates the psychoanalytic paradox that while analysands present for analytic treatment, whose hallmark is the development of understanding that will help relieve suffering, it soon emerges that they are ambivalent about just such a process. Some may for a long time feel too mistrustful and humiliated to embrace a dependency on the analyst that requires them to examine and speak intolerable impulses, desires, and perceived shortcomings. Insight itself can be a threat to some patients, and if this goes unaddressed, the treatment can founder.