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The final essay in this volume of Roy Schafer's newer papers, “The Author's Odyssey: You Can Get There from Here,” serves not only as a useful orientation to the author's work of the past decades, but also to the central themes of the book itself; it would have made a wonderful introductory chapter. In this essay, Schafer reviews the development of his thought, defining two “red threads” that run through it: his primary interest in the nature of interpretation, and his conflict between a wish to accept and enhance received wisdom in the field, and his “powerful inclination to challenge that heritage” (p. 156) when it seems to him to fall short, becoming reified or too abstract.
Schafer's strong interest in interpretation led him away from the exclusive concern with ego functions, structures, and energies that characterized classical psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, which he saw as a belabored “deterrent to finding meaning” (p. 159). His early writings attempted to situate affects, empathy, and the superego in a wider context: blending an ego psychological approach to empathy with Erikson's formulations of psychosocial development; emphasizing that the superego had benign, loving features in addition to aggressive ones; and locating an understanding of affects in the context of “individualized, fantasy-laden versions of basic conflicts” (p. 157). Schafer became increasingly drawn toward such questions as: How is psychoanalytic understanding developed? To what extent is it guided or controlled by our theories? To what extent have our hypotheses been presented as empirical