Roy Schafer, Ph.D. 1922 – 2018

Roy Schafer was born on December 14, 1922 and died on August 5, 2018 at the age of 95. His parents were uneducated Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the Bronx, economically oppressed and culturally marginalized. From these origins, he later believed, stemmed traits that shaped his professional life: “cautious observer, outsider and interpreter” (Schafer 2000). Interpretation was central to all of his thinking.

After public schools, he attended the City College of New York, initially planning a career as a high school physics teacher, but was soon seduced into psychology by its distinguished Department, under the leadership of Gardner Murphy. He graduated in 1943 and, with Murphy’s hearty recommendation, moved to the Psychology Department at Menninger under the leadership of David Rapaport. Throughout his life, starting with Rapaport, his intellectual brilliance and creativity allowed him to learn from distinguished mentors, absorb their teaching, and then move beyond them to new discoveries.

In 1947, after a stint in the armed forces, he moved on to Austen Riggs and came under the influence of Merton Gill, Margaret Brenman, and Erik Erikson, while receiving his Ph.D. at Clark University in 1950. This led, in 1953, to Yale and psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute, where he had contact with Hans Loewald and underwent his second psychoanalysis, with William Pious. He continued his distinguished career at Cornell and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, and went on to gain recognition and positions of leadership in the world of psychoanalysis.

My closest personal contact with Roy was in the 1970s, when we were both on Cornell University’s full-time faculty and our offices were a few yards apart. I was the new Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry

and building an extraordinary group of psychoanalysts in the Department—Otto and Paulina Kernberg, Arnold Cooper, Ted Shapiro, and others. Roy was eager to return to New York City from New Haven,