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In Tradition and Change in Psychoanalysis, Roy Schafer, one of our field's most articulate and thoughtful scholars, explores continuity and change within current psychoanalytic pluralism. In my view, he stakes out a logical, measured, and constructive position among competing psychoanalytic perspectives. The latter are often described in flamboyantly provocative rhetoric, as radical departures in seeming discontinuity with other more traditional, analytic perspectives, leading some to predict the collapse of a unified psychoanalytic world. Schafer recognises the common roots of psychoanalytic ideas and views change as transformation with inevitable lines of common descent that are traceable via a careful reading of the history of psychoanalytic ideas. Grounded within a post-modern narrative, hermeneutic position, Schafer champions different narrations of a psychoanalytic point of view, while maintaining ‘a deep respect for contributions to the discipline made under the banner of tradition’ (Preface, p. x).
In placing this collection of essays within the context of Schafer's previous psychoanalytic work, one can discern how he has been influenced by arguments against Freud's nineteenth-century mechanistic-evolutionary-naturalistic perspective. Schafer's embrace of modern Kleinian perspectives, especially dyadic dynamics and projective-introjective clinical phenomena, and his involvement in the realms of hermeneutics and intersubjectivity, represent his most recent view of psychoanalytic theory.
The book is divided into three sections. The first begins appropriately with an examination of the merits and limits of Heinz Hartmann's contributions to psychoanalysis as a general psychology. In an especially respectful and thoughtful way, he dissects within the grand edifice of Hartmann's theory of adaptational egopsychology, moral, epistemological and clinical blind spots, contradictions and inconsistencies that have led to the potentially emancipating new perspective