Roy Schafer, trained as a psychologist, was one of the best teachers of psychoanalytic ideas our field has ever produced. In addition to being a brilliant scholar, an engaging writer, and a fund of immense creativity, he was a practitioner of the clinical art and science of daily work in the office. His mind was extraordinarily expansive, restless to critique and improve the theory and technique of analytic work and to elaborate ever deepening understandings of the mind.

Over six decades his career traversed psychological research with David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic; then—also with Rapaport—working on the staff of the Austen Riggs Center from 1947 to 1953, where he was supervised by Erik Erikson; becoming the chief psychologist in the