The Spirit I Learned: Interview with Roy Schafer (January 26, 2004)

In January of 2004, I had the privilege to meet Roy Schafer, PhD .1 I was working on a chapter for a book on Edith Jacobson, MD , co-edited by two psychoanalysts and historians of psychoanalysis practicing in Germany (May & Muehlleitner, 2005). Ambiguously titled “Upon Reading What She Said, or, On the Making of a Female Psychoanalyst” (Wagner, 2005), the chapter was partly a detective work. I tried to find Jacobson's analysands and supervisees in order to hear from them how the encounters with Edith—she was remembered with great fondness and intimacy—and not only her published contributions to the field impacted them and their practice. What started tentatively and slowly, gained in force and speed. One person directed me to another, and I soon saw a rich “family tree” growing in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Haven.

Access to Dr. Schafer was granted by the recommendation of his close friend, William I. Grossman, MD. My mentor in many important ways (and himself an analysand of Jacobson), Dr. Grossman knew a detail in his friend's professional biography: how he became a training analyst. Edith Jacobson played a part; Roy Schafer was ready to tell the story.

What follows is the transcript of our dialogue, slightly edited and annotated.2 The account of the brief and unique relationship, Schafer–Jacobson, is at its center. Yet, the world Dr. Schafer, a generous interlocutor, brings closer to the contemporary reader is much larger. Even if removed from our present by more than 20 years, his observations still command analytic attention.

A gift I acknowledge with gratitude: the spirit I learned.