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Whatever people may say about orthodoxy, it is essential to clean up rubbish. One can do so politely, and, most of all, one must do it with fairness.
Early in my analytic training, Adrienne Applegarth complained to me, in a moment of exasperation, that psychoanalysts never throw anything out. Sooner or later, as serious students of psychoanalysis, we find ourselves continually beset by a bewildering array of theories, part-theories, anti-theories, loosely held ideas and unmoored clinical approaches, innumerable old and new orthodoxies (psychoanalytic “schools”), and, in this country, a generally xenophobic approach to all of the above. It's a mess. Post-Freud, who's in charge here? No one, as it turns out. Psychoanalysis has burst the bonds of any reliable orthodoxy and splintered into many solar systems. How do we gain our footing as practicing analysts amid this cacophony? How do we know what's true? How do we figure out what psychoanalysis is, and who we are as analysts?
In this review I hope to follow the development of Roy Schafer's thinking as a profoundly serious psychoanalyst, someone with a convincing grasp of what psychoanalysis is, and who he is as an analyst. I see the arc of Schafer's career as it is traced in Tragic Knots as having organized for him a potentially terminal, mind-numbing psychoanalytic pluralism into a reliably coherent theory, and, most important, as having established the position of “analyst” within the clinical situation in a convincing way. I will try to illustrate what he has been able to do and how he did it, based on Tragic Knots as part scholarly journey and part intellectual memoir. I want to show how Schafer, with impeccable scholarship and relentless