Roy Schafer, 1922–2018

Psychoanalysis lost one of its giants when Roy Schafer died on 5 August 2018 at the age of 95.

Roy was educated at the City College of New York (B.A.), the University of Kansas (M.A.) and Clark University (Ph.D.), and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute. He was an influential presence in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking for more than seven decades. He was only 23 years old when, with David Rapaport and Merton Gill, he co-authored the seminal Diagnostic Psychological Testing, and he had published two more important books about testing by the time he was 32. His focus shifted, in its object more than in its vision, to psychoanalytic theory beginning with “Generative Empathy in the Treatment Situation” (1959), and he produced 11 more books and more than 70 papers over the course of 54 years.

Roy was intellectually restless; he constantly probed the limits—and the limitations—of received theory, including the theories within which he was working at any moment. Trained in the ego psychological tradition under the strict mentorship of Rapaport, his first psychoanalytic book, Aspects of Internalization (1968), was anchored in an emended version of mainstream theory. But eight years later, breaking decisively with the ideas of the man to whom he referred in a poem (Roy wrote poetry throughout his life) as “tyrannical critic, unstinting benefactor,” he wrote the provocative and groundbreaking A New Language for Psychoanalysis (1976), in which he argued that a metapsychology relying on concepts of force and structure was inappropriate to a discourse designed to explore meaning, intention, choice, and action.

In later years Roy was drawn to and embraced the work of contemporary Kleinian thinkers, Betty Joseph, Michael Feldman, John Steiner, and Ron Britton among others. This final turn seemed anomalous and even shocking; to many, it appeared that he had turned his back on his ego psychological roots; Rapaport, after all, had charact