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In his seventh monograph, Roy Schafer continues to expand the incisive vision and re-vision of psychoanalytic domains he has forwarded for nearly 30 years. I offer the term re-vision (as opposed to revision) in the spirit of Schafer's postmodern bent and the exquisite sensitivity to language it embodies. Indeed, as a writer of intellectual history, he invites us to see both past and present anew by examining the way in which we see as much as the subject at hand does. Potential pitfalls of embracing a thorny epistemological problem, trendy vocabulary (which discourse is privileged would seem to have a finite luster), or the chaos of a relativistic perspective, are largely avoided by Schafer's lucidity and depth of thought.
The volume collects 15 papers, most of which were recently published, under subheadings: Changing Directions; Further Clinical Explorations; and Authority, Morality and Conformity. Of various length and ambition, the individual works keep each other's company well. The central common thread is a view of psychoanalysis within a narrative, constructivist, hermeneutic context. With respect to specific content, an ego-psychological tradition is infused with feminist thought, Kleinian and other object-relational theory, and sharp attunement to the multifaceted importance of countertransference. The last opens the way for trenchant discussion of the antiauthoritarian, intersubjective, experiential landscape of the psychoanalytic frontier.
To whom is Schafer speaking? A clue may be that the text is flanked by papers revisiting the work of Heinz Hartmann. Like Hans Loewald, whose writings appear to be generated from an inner dialogue with Freud, Schafer returns to that seminal thinker of his generation as a touchstone in his journey. In appreciation of his teacher, he reminds us of the rigor and then-radicalism of the concept