A New Language for Psychoanalysis: By Roy Schafer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976. 394 pp.

This volume represents a collection and a re-editing of a series of papers written by Roy Schafer over the past half dozen years, together with an extensive section applying his concepts to the problem of emotion. While many of these papers are already available in the literature, their collection in a single volume gives an impression of the sweep and scope of Schafer's thinking that can hardly be gained by a here-and-there reading of separate papers. The result is a most impressive document. Those who know the depth, scope, penetration, boldness, and imaginativeness of Roy Schafer's thinking, will find the present volume up to his usual high standards and the reading of it a challenging experience.

Schafer's criticism is directed to the methodology and the form of psychoanalytic thinking that has become second nature to most of us: the approach to psychoanalytic concepts that utilizes a natural science modality of theorizing. This approach, he claims, attempts to understand and explain psychic phenomena in terms of entities, processes, structures, drives and forces, impulses, motives, functions, etc., which populate the mental world; these then begin to take on the connotation of entities of substance by which the various aspects of psychic activity are explained. The inevitable direction of such natural science thinking is toward reifications and anthropomorphisms—as though the mind were divided up into a series of lesser minds, to each of which is attributed intentions, goals, characteristics, and qualities. Schafter decries what he believes to be violations of essentially scientific modalities of understanding. They represent to him the prolongation of a concretistic, animistic, primary process form of thinking which can lay little claim to the name of science.

While on the clinical level we deal with our patients as symbol-making and meaning-oriented personal agents, on the level of theoretical discourse we deal with them as aggregates of psychic machine