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As time marches on, it seems to me that our institutional psychoanalytic memory regarding those who have touched us in enduring ways grows increasingly faulty. With the exception of a very few analysts around whom many of us organize our thinking and allegiances (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Bion), the truly gifted and more recently among us are too often forgotten. This should not be.
Here we pay tribute to the late Roy Schafer, a master of the psychoanalytic endeavor in all its facets. In addition to an obituary written by three analysts deeply impacted by Schafer as teacher, supervisor, and author, we reprint a seminal paper by Schafer, originally published in JAPA in 1974. As Gerald Fogel highlights in his generous introductory commentary, Schafer's “Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women” showcases an intelligence that comes to us only once or twice in a generation. In this paper Schafer takes on an entire edifice of theory and practice that was not only misguided, but was harmful to all concerned. We encounter in this paper, then, not only a mind of great agility, but also an ethical sensibility that demands the recurrent interrogation of received wisdom, especially “wisdom” that comes from the original source of all that comes after.
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