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When Mitchell Wilson asked me to write this introduction, we agreed to keep two goals in mind. First, how might we place Roy Schafer's 1974 paper, “Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women,” in its immediate historical context? What had been going on in the author's work and in analytic theory and practice at the time the paper was written, and how was it received? Second, how might the paper be placed in the entirety of Schafer's work? For more than sixty years he produced creative, elegantly written papers on a multitude of psychoanalytic topics. How did his work evolve and change over those years, and how did the analytic world change during that time?
In a personal memoir, “The Author's Odyssey: You Can Get Here from There,” Schafer (2009) describes the course of his intellectual development over a long and productive life in psychoanalysis. Earlier he had concluded that “the red thread running through all [his] writings is investigating the nature of interpretation;” in retrospect, however, he now had discovered “a second red thread: conflict between a powerful wish to accept, master, and if possible enhance received wisdom and an equally powerful inclination to challenge that heritage and find it wanting” (p. 156).
In “Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women” Schafer is extremely critical of Freud's published views on women, and finds them seriously wanting. Rosemary Balsam (2013) tells us that Schafer's paper had an immediate and profound impact on the analytic world. In the paper he synthesizes brilliant scholarly research and argument with clarity,