A Conversation with Roy Schafer

GF: Tell me about your background and how you became interested in psychoanalysis.

RS: I am the second of four children of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Both parents came here as young people. It was basically a working class family. I went to public schools in the Bronx and then to City College. I got interested in psychology when I was taking an introductory course as a fill-in. The young instructor, Joseph Barmack, took up many progressive aspects of psychology, including Freud's “Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis.” I knew at once that this was for me. There was no profession of clinical psychology in the late 30s or early 40s; it didn't look as if you could become an analyst unless you were a physician, and yet here I was already aiming toward psychoanalytic psychology. It was a very chancy decision.

World War II had already broken out as I was approaching graduation and, as it happened, David Rapaport of the Menninger Clinic was looking for a research assistant. Gardner Murphy, the head of the Psych Department at City College, recommended me to him and he took me on. I was about 20 years old. I was in heaven. I did not really know what I was getting into, although I had heard of the Menninger Clinic as a psychoanalytically oriented hospital—really quite an innovative place at that time.

GF: Did you know Rapaport's work or did this job evolve only through Murphy's influence?

RS: Through Murphy's influence, plus that of other instructors in the department—especially Isidor Chein and Max Hertzman.

GF: Were they cultivating your interest in psychoanalysis?

RS: Yes. Also, I had done a student experimental research project on need and perception under Murphy's direction as well as some research on the Rorschach test for Max Hertzman, who was interested in projective techniques and psychoanalysis. And when I expressed my interest in becoming an analyst to Murphy, he arranged for me to interview some senior analysts at the New York Institute, all of whom told me that the chances of my getting analytic training were nil unless I had a medical degree. I really didn't want to go to medical school, and so I made only a few half-hearted and inadequate gestures in that direction and let it go at that.

GF: It's unusual to have known so early that you wanted to be a psychoanalyst. It must have left you with a difficult choice to be told that this path of clinical psychology was so unlikely to lead to such a goal.

RS: It was, but at that time my interest in psychology itself was such that I could think of myself happily as a psychology professor or researcher. I wasn't thinking exclusively or even mainly of practice at the time, though I did want to get full analytic training. At the Menninger Clinic, studying under Rapaport, I had learned psychological testing and psychoanalytic theory. Then, in 1947, I went to the Austen Riggs Center to do the testing, and I began personal analysis.

GF: What was it about Freud that first got your attention?

RS: Really, everything. Everything I read about neurosis, the unconscious, dreams.

GF: People will sometimes recall something in particular, something that touched their inner lives in some way. Did you read something and say, “Oh, that's me?”

RS: I think almost everything I read in Freud seemed to have to do with me. I was enthralled by his talking about all the typical inner conflicts over sexuality and aggression and their connections with guilt, anxiety, depression, withdrawal. In an unformed way I was then very inward in my orientation. I felt that everything Freud touched he turned into gold. When I went to Menningers (to go back to that sequence), I was to help Rapaport with his research on diagnostic psychological testing, but he also taught me a lot about psychoanalysis. He was a severe, brilliant, and in some ways inhibiting teacher.

GF: Inhibiting how?

RS: He was very good himself at using projective tests and also nonprojective tests for projective purposes, that is, to analyze personality patterns and unconscious dynamics from test responses; but his role at Menningers and the function of the research was to correlate test performance with diagnosis, particularly through the structural study of ego functions. And structural theory was his prime interest; he discouraged my other, more clinical interests.

GF: In the introduction to the collection of your testing papers, Projective Testing and Psychoanalysis, you talk briefly about clinical sensibility. I remember thinking when I first read it that this was essentially the same subject that would later become expanded into one of your major interests—your examination of clinical sensibility in The Analytic Attitude. In that early book you discuss how people with clinical sensibility intuitively recognize each other. Did Rapaport have this clinical sensibility?

RS: I think he did up to a point. I had to get further on my own. I went into the army after I had been at Menningers for a couple of years. The war was just about ended at the time. I was working on the psychiatric ward at Walter Reade Regional Hospital. I tested many psychiatric patients, and on my own I began to write reports that were dynamic and characterological psychological portraits as well as diagnostic studies. When I got out of the army, at Menningers and then at the Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, I was doing more and more portraiture plus diagnosis. I started to publish that kind of work in the 50s.

GF: Was Riggs intellectually exciting?

GF: That paper is not quoted as often as I would expect. Why is that?

RS: I think it is too Eriksonian. I was surprised that The Psychoanalytic Quarterly accepted it. The Quarterly is not usually that broad.

GF: The paper has not often been quoted by the Kohutians or by other people writing on empathy in response to the Kohutians. Yours was a paper in a major journal. I always wondered why it was not usually picked up in literature reviews.

RS: That's happened with other papers of mine. For instance, my paper of the mid-70s in JAPA, “Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women,” has been overlooked in a number of Freudian papers that otherwise have extended bibliographies.

GF: How do you understand that?

RS: It is more likely to happen in the standard American analytic journals. The kind of critique of Freud in my paper is not always welcome there. The then editor of JAPA told me that it had been accepted even though it was considered quite controversial. Many colleagues consider me either a maverick or some equivalent of an antianalytic psychoanalyst.

GF: Revisionist?

RS: Revisionist, at least. Some say and write that I've thrown out the concept of the unconscious and that I am interested only in conscious, goal-directed behavior and directive psychotherapy. There are strongly ambivalent attitudes toward my work. Similarly, many of the feminist writers do not refer to that paper on women.

GF: I've noticed that many candidates who are not familiar with your earlier work do not understand that the later work is securely founded on a thorough assimilation of traditional analytic practice and what has always struck me as a deeply respectful attitude toward Freud and Freud's ideas. Is that the sort of thing you've found?

RS: Yes. A number of critical articles on my work on action language have been published in the analytic journals, and very little that I know of has been written using it or even acknowledging it as another interesting way of thinking. When I stopped writing so directly on action language itself, there were colleagues who said, “Oh, he's coming back to us,” as though I had gone through some weird period.

GF: What do you think the misunderstanding is and why does it run so deep?

RS: In principle, I have to accept some responsibility for not having stated my case clearly enough, even though at the time I took great pains to include all the appropriate qualifications, underlinings, and explanations. I suppose, too, that at times there was a certain overassertiveness in the way that I wrote that put people off, which, I think, is not unusual when someone is trying to break new ground: One shows one's insecurity in that way. Also, my throwing out metapsychological ways of thinking: many colleagues think that whole vocabulary is inextricably tied to ideas about conflict, desire, development, and unconscious mental processes; they think those metapsychological words—force, mechanism, energy, etc.—testify to one's belief in the basic factors of psychoanalytic interpretation, so that no matter how much time I spent trying to say and to demonstrate in case discussions that one can talk about Freudian psychoanalysis otherwise, they still believe there is something unanalytic about it. They don't see metapsychology as an optional language. Also, I see now that some abrupt leaps in my reasoning weakened my argument.

I should say here that I don't believe in direct access to raw experience. That's why lately I have been emphasizing the narrative aspect of psychoanalysis; I think everything that becomes experience has to have been approached with some kind of preestablished orientation and context. That idea is not in any way original. I think that today the idea is very widely accepted outside of psychoanalysis but not in it, even though, as I see it, that's precisely what analysts have been doing in their work—telling and retelling narratives. My aim in emphasizing the role of narration in forming experience is to sharpen and integrate the conceptual approach to what analysts do when they treat people; not that they can't borrow from other disciplines. For me, unlike Donald Spence, narration is not an alternative to historical truth; like most modern historians I believe that historical truth exists only in narrated form and is a retelling of previously narrated material.

GF: The clinical experience of structurally oriented ego psychologists enables them to have useful and good things to say about the evolution and nature of how inner experience is organized, however. Is this not what is meant when the terms structuralization and structure are used? And I associate the ability to accommodate and assimilate various points of view with an ego psychology that is independent of aspirations to be more than psychoanalysis. One strength of ego psychology has been its modifiable borders. You seem to see it differently.

RS: We can't do full justice to the complexity of the problem here. But I will say that now I think psychic structure itself is not an essence out in nature; it is just one of the inescapable terms of traditional metapsychology. A recent issue of JAPA (Vol. 36 Supplement, 1988) contains the more extensive remarks on this question I prepared as one of two wrap-up discussants of three consecutive panels on psychic structure at an American Psychoanalytic Association meeting. There I contend that most analysts today are not busying themselves with the complex metapsychological foundations of concepts like structure. As I see it, they are talking about certain regularities and certain patterns that they think they see. I would say

that they both see them and impose a mixture of their present ideas on the data, and that's how they turn them into analytic data. There has to be something there to do something with, but what the thing in itself is, is indeterminate, for you can approach it only through some ideas or the use of some language or storyline.

Many people have responded to my work on action language and narratology as though I were proposing a new approach to clinical analysis. In my view, what I have been trying to say all along is this: this is what good clinical analysts have always been doing. If, for example, you look at the interpretation of motives, dreams, slips, or symptoms, ultimately each phenomenon is interpreted as an action, something that that person is doing unconsciously; I would now add that the way you describe the action has to do with certain kinds of preferred explanatory storylines. Self psychology uses its own explanatory storylines for actions; I just don't think they are as good—inclusive and integrative—as the traditional Freudian ones. Metapsychology, too, is a set of storylines—rather poor ones, I now think.

GF: I think that people are predisposed to hear the word “action” as something separate from and mutually exclusive of experience.

RS: Essentially, analysts interpret experience as action. For instance, if we deal with a man who has made suffering part of his history, we are probably already thinking of that suffering as action. When we say it's masochistic, one of the essential things we mean, whatever other differences there are, is that this man has a stake in experiencing things in a certain painful way; we say that he repetitively construes events one way that could be construed differently and also brings about painful situations that might have been developed differently. Thus, as analysts we try to show people that even what they call their experience is not something that is there, something they are just looking at introspectively; rather, they are making it in one important and interpretable respect or another. That's what makes it an action. Action language points to a vital shift of view in the sense that it establishes a better foundation for thinking about activity, ultimately a new focus for developing a more adaptive perspective on life. As I see it, that is the conventional goal of ego psychological analytic work. If it is not action, it is not changeable.

GF: Do you think psychoanalytic theory and theorizing is in a healthy state now?

RS: Yes, except perhaps for the hardliners of traditional metapsychology, who, I think, are now falling behind the times. The extent of their intolerance of the new has, however, been exaggerated. I do think that they would be more exclusive if the price were not too high, but they seem to recognize that the economic and political times require more intellectual and clinical openness. That, I think, is wonderful.

GF: Are there responses to your work that you particularly value?

RS: It is not rare, when I give talks in different cities, that younger people in the field will come up and tell me how much my book The Analytic Attitude has meant to them or how much my writings in general have, and how clear I have made things. They don't usually say they are following some radically new way I think about things. I have given many workshops on my ideas and have had at those times protracted arguments or discussions with friendly colleagues, at the end of which they say to me, “Well, maybe there is something to what you say. This has been a very clarifying experience.” They mean that I have sharpened important issues for them and they are grateful. It's not that I have won adherents to a new psychoanalysis or new mode of practice; I have presented ideas in a way that sharpens the significant issues, and my listeners are then in a better position to think about some significant aspects of psychoanalysis.

GF: The paper now seems to me predictive of the synthesis of your analytic sensibility with what became your interest in narrative. I wonder if you knew where you were going when you wrote it. I believe that at the time it was written no one before had brought together in an effective way the worlds of literary narrative and the psychoanalytic project. When I read the paper now, it really hangs together in that respect.

RS: I didn't know where I was heading then. I wrote the paper just before I began doing the explicit work on action language, although it does already have a lot of action language in it as well as an emphasis on narrative. Its existential aspects highlight how much people have made their own lives and the tragic conflicts and elements in their lives. I showed that analytic work could be viewed from a different perspective, one that has the germ of the storyline or narrative thesis, although then I was talking about it mainly in terms of visions of the world—more as perception than narration.

GF: Any regrets looking back? Would you do anything differently?

RS: No. I love doing analysis. I have the same feeling of excitement and love for the subject that I had when I first became a psychologist. I love thinking about it, and writing about it, and discussing it, and I don't have a pessimistic view of it as a therapy. It helps different people in different ways and to different degrees, but I find it's not in any way a failure. I think a lot of the disillusionment with analysis results from people having idealized views of it, thinking anything is analyzable or accessible to clinical interpretation, and they are taking their concepts and methods too much for granted.

GF: I sense increasing interest in psychoanalysis in recent years among younger people, both medical and nonmedical. Do you sense that too?

RS: I do, in terms of its becoming more established as a way of getting to basic issues and its being borrowed from by other therapeutic approaches and its becoming part of the way people think about themselves and their relationships in everyday life, psychoanalysis has become an essential part of modern existence.