Remembrance of Things Past and Present

IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE ON THIS DAY commemorating the work of Harry Stack Sullivan to take a look at his newest "look alike, " Roy Schafer, who comes from the heart of psychoanalytic country, to see if there has been something we could call convergence that has led to such a striking resemblance. The resemblance I speak of is that they both came to view life as a tale that is told as well as lived, and they both have described psychotherapy as a process of getting help from an expert in making some necessary revisions in a morbid story line. I find this comparison particularly interesting because if we, as many others do, consider Schafer to be at the leading edge of psychoanalytic development, then we must consider Sullivan not to have been off to the side of the mainstream of psychoanalysis but rather a generation ahead in his thinking. It is clear that Sullivan started from outside the psychoanalytic camp in the traditional psychiatric art of precise clinical observation. Schafer was trained as a clinical psychologist, coming up through psychoanalytic training to the position of a leading theorist in that field. For me this makes their over-lapping end-points all the more authentic because they travelled very different routes to get there. Even though Sullivan emphasized the objective nature of observation, his concept of consensual validation turned out to be as subjective as Schafer's concept of common sense. Certainly they both worked clinically in the area of the patient's subjective experience.

As a first clue in our search for convergence, we might begin by remembering that the talking cure has always been conducted by talking. Not reading, not writing, but by putting into words to another person all of one's thoughts, feelings and behaviors which have made no sense, by which I mean they do not make a coherent and acceptable life story. We teach our students in supervision, a talking process. While it is true that in our professional lives, we do