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In this wonderful little book, Roy Schafer once again demonstrates the clinical acumen, human warmth, and encyclopedic grasp of the range of psychoanalytic theory-building that have made him one of the most important figures on the analytic scene. “Troubled persons entering psychoanalysis,” Schafer states at the onset, “depend on their analysts to maintain their analytic position through thick and thin” (p. xi). It is not easy for psychoanalysts to do this, however. One reason is the arduous challenge presented by encountering and working with their patients' painfully tormenting negative feelings and the powerful defensive maneuvers they use to minimize or ward them off—and to encounter and work with these feelings and the defenses against them that are stirred within analysts themselves in the course of an analysis.
In this book, Schafer focuses in particular upon feelings of humiliation and mortification (extremes of the feeling of shame); disappointment; envy; abandonment; rejection and loss; and the sense of vulnerability associated with one's own and others' goodness as efforts are made to move toward maturity that for some time has been anxiously or guiltily avoided (pp. xii-xiii). As he seeks to assist the reader in embracing and working with these feelings, Schafer is guided by the campaign to unify traditional Freudian theory and technique with the clinical approach of the contemporary Kleinian psychoanalysts in London that has preoccupied him over the years. The result is a slim volume that amply repays the reader for the time and effort required to ingest and digest what Schafer has to offer.
In chapter 1, “A Joyless Life,” we are introduced to Ted, a patient whom we will periodically encounter again as we peregrinate through the book. Ted has been leading a “manifestly lonely, unhappy,