A Brief Note on the Critical Contributions of Roy Schafer. Jacques Angelergues, pp.  845-847.

Schafer, beginning with A New Language for Psychoanalysis—with rebel intentions present from the title onward—vigorously enunciated a strong position on narrative in psychoanalysis.13 He undertook a search for psychological realism and impersonal theorizing

hidden in metapsychology. His polemic continued in later works.14 Schafer treats ironically certain theoretical presuppositions in Freud that begin by describing the infant and young child as an animal, what one would designate as an “it,” and that end with a description of the domestication of that animal.

Schafer's efforts focus on a reevaluation of what the analysand says. Though one can applaud this emphasis on the personal nature of a singular encounter with the patient, we may also be surprised that Schafer seems so little sensitive to the clinical quality of numerous psychoanalytic works, including those of the post-Hartmannian ego psychology that he discusses in particular. For Schafer, psychoanalysis has restricted good sense by regarding only certain factors as organizing principles or structures, such as pleasure in opposition to reality, and the id in opposition to the ego.

Psychoanalysis is described as the study of the psyche conceived as a machine. This machine or psychic apparatus has its inertia; it does not function except when put in motion by a force and then does so in a closed circuit. The quantity of energy is invariable: the amount that is stored or expended in one part diminishes the available energy for other operations by the same amount. Schafer maintains that these points of view are only narrative structures, the combination of which constitutes an incoherent theory. Meta-psychology is a badly done, do-it-yourself effort and a patched-up job; it would be better to start over from the beginning. Schafer repudiates the genetic point of view, preferring instead the onto-logical view of the hermeneuti