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Roy Schafer's latest book pulls together papers that initially appeared in earlier publications, expands them, adds new material, and emerges as an ambitious attempt to revise fundamental aspects of Freudian metapsychology. What he is proposing to do is to write a new set of linguistic rules for the description of mental processes and behavior. His is an action language that avoids the more flagrantly anthropomorphic aspects of metapsychological language, wherein people are the objects of their own mechanisms (are, for example, driven by their impulses or tortured by their introjects), and that instead places the person who is the doer, or subject, of any particular action at its center.
It is one thing for the patient to claim that his unconscious causes him to do the crazy things he does, and another for the analyst to do so, for if the latter permits this kind of primitive metaphor to consistently color the language of his interpretations, he will encouarge the patient to disown, and to dissociate, actions that properly belong within the patient's own agency. If we take a concrete illustration cited by Schafer, an interpretation that says, “Your chronic deep sense of worthlessness comes from the condemning inner voice of your mother,” would be better phrased as, “You regularly imagine your mother's voice condemning you, and, agreeing with it, regard yourself as being essentially worthless.” The author reminds us that the patient's mother cannot possibly enter his body—or his “mind”—yet the patient may well fantasize that she has, and our metapsychological language unfortunately encourages him to take his fantasy as true.
What Schafer does with incorporation he also does with a variety of other frequently used concepts—such as self, identity, emotion, and resistance—each of which tends to be reified and overpersonified in the natural-science vocabulary of traditional theory. While he is at pains to locate his revisions squarely within the core of orthodox psychoanal