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Analysts are human beings. Dr Schafer is at pains to stress this fact again and again as backcloth, so to speak, to his carefully worked out professionalism, his studies of the analyst at work.
In his first chapter he fashions ‘an introductory outline of the analytic attitude’ which ‘is intended to convey as briefly as possible the ideal I have come to aspire to in my work as an analyst’, selectively condensing ‘the best of what I have learned from my teachers, my reading, my clinical work and my previous efforts to teach or write on topics that bear on the analytic attitude.’ This is an inspiring chapter, especially for trainees, and leads naturally to his second chapter on ‘The atmosphere of safety’ which he links firmly with Freud's ‘Papers on Technique’ published between 1911 and 1915. This is salutary because in the years that followed, Freud's followers did not always carry a reputation for providing an atmosphere of safety until much later, when many of them reclaimed it in a typically Winnicottian Post-Second-World-War era in England.
Stimulating and helpful as they are, however, chapters one and two are pedestrian compared with chapter three. As the page is turned, it is as though, after the inevitable trudge in an uphill climb, a rise is surmounted, a corner turned, and a breath-taking view bursts upon the senses. That at least is my ‘action language’ response (to fall in with Schafer's idiom), to reading chapter three, which is about empathising. In Jungian circles it is surprising how infrequently this function is explicitly discussed, considering how much weight is regularly given to the much less precise, overall or umbrella function of feeling. I presume that this omission stems from Jung's mistrust, for many years, of his own feeling function, and hence of his capacity for empathy. In fact, as we have come to realise, this very mistrust was based on a truer empathy, albeit implicit rather than explicit, than that of many a relatively heartless person w