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Roy Schafer's authorial voice - distinctive, endlessly striving for conceptual clarity and a systematic approach - is one of the great authentic psychoanalytic voices of our time. His characteristic literary style, his passion and his precision have been present throughout his writings and Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis is no exception. This latest addition to his vast body of work collects Schafer's papers from the past decade or so. The book is organized into three major parts or sections: On basic concepts, The internal world of conflict and phantasy, and Changing conceptions of the analytic relationship. The chapters are edited and organized with novelistic skill into a coherent whole, supplemented here and there by previously unpublished chapters that contribute to the project. There is a preface that looks at the work from the perspective of the history of psychoanalytic ideas, with special attention paid to the evolution of the author's thinking. The closing chapter of the book is entitled: ‘You Can Get There From Here’. It is a thoughtful intellectual memoir describing the author's journey in psychoanalysis throughout the years, and adds an appealing personal coda to the work.
In that personal memoir, Schafer tells us that he sees throughout all his work two “red threads.” First is his deliberate investigation of the nature of interpretation. Second, seen only in retrospect, is a “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. 159). In this book, he repeatedly points out this process of refashioning one's self-narrative.
The task of summarizing Schafer's complex thought is made easier by his ability to summarize himself. Here is an example from the preface: