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You Can Get Here From ThereDr. Roy Schafer Ph.D. aa Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and ResearchPublished online: 01 Jul 2008.

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You Can Get Here From There

R O Y S C H A F E R, Ph.D.

29

Dr. Schafer is Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center

for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and in private practice in New York City.

This paper is a review of my development from psychologyintern and research assistant to the psychoanalytic tester andtheoretician David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in the1940s, through my career in psychological testing, mypsychoanalytic training in the Western New England Institute,and my working successively at the Austen Riggs Center, YaleDepartment of Psychiatry, Yale Student Mental Health Center,Cornell Department of Psychiatry, and eventually privatepractice in New York City. During this period, I rose to theacademic rank of Professor and the analytic position of TrainingAnalyst. I have written extensively: first on testing, then moreor less in turn on psychoanalytic ego psychology, actionlanguage for psychoanalysis, feminist issues, narrative inpsychoanalysis, and the contemporary Kleinians of London.This memoir traces the intellectual continuity that characterizesthese writings and my continuing development as a psycho-analyst—my first ambition and great love.

ITERARY AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL scholars have come to viewLthe writing of autobiography and memoirs as a creativeopportunity each provides the writer with an occasion for further

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self-fashioning. Taking one’s past for a subject allows for extensivereconstructing of memories. These memories are more or less fluidin that they are continuously subject to reconstruction. In the processof telling and retelling one’s history, the narrator may introducecontinuities, discontinuities, predestined outcomes, and pureinventions, all of them serving present aims, defenses, values, andobligations. The narration of historical events and circumstances byhistorians has also been considered to offer the same creativepossibilities.

In responding to the Editor’s invitation to give an account of thedevelopment of my ideas on psychoanalysis, I cannot presume tohave resisted the temptation to engage in further self-fashioning. Myreaders will come to their own conclusions—within their ownperspectives—about the adequacy of my developmental account. Iwould, however, argue that this project is not unlike personalpsychoanalysis in that it, too, is a process of discovery.

Earlier reflections on my past had yielded the conclusion that thered thread running through all my writings is investigating the natureof interpretation. I still judge that conclusion to be valid. But now Imust add a second red thread: conflict between a powerful wish toaccept, master, and if possible enhance received wisdom and anequally powerful inclination to challenge that heritage and find itwanting. I realized that when I took up writing papers specificallyon psychoanalysis, my first three attempts—on empathy (1959), thesuperego (1960), and affects (1964)—already showed signs of bothdevotion to and dissatisfaction with the structural theory I had beenstudying closely and teaching for fifteen years.

On empathy, I tried to blend an ego-psychological approach withErikson’s psychosocial developmental formulations in Childhood andSociety (1950), a book that was, in one way, challenging the strictformalism of mid-century ego psychology.

On the superego, I tried to show that throughout his structuralcontributions Freud was not united in his thinking about thiscomponent of his theory: on the one hand, his idea of the superegodepended on aggressive energy as its source and its means ofoperating; on the other hand, although he did so in a marginalizedway, Freud could not help recognizing its benign, protective, “lovingand beloved” aspects.

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On affects, I tried to supplement the psychoeconomic dischargetheorizing then prevailing in the psychoanalytic literature by showingthat an analyst’s understanding of affects in the life of each analysanddepends on the concrete clinical situations and operations of analyticwork; that is to say, in practice, affects are always contextualizedand interpreted in dynamic terms that pertain to individualized,fantasy-laden versions of basic conflicts.

Although I do not claim to have been the first to move in any ofthese three directions, I do believe that I attempted to develop eachpaper in a distinctively systematic way. Now I also believe that I wasbeginning to become restless under the constraints of formalmetapsychological discussion of ego functions, structures, energies,and subjective experience in human relationships. Somehow, I seemedto be finding metapsychology a deterrent to viewing the analyticprocess as the site of meaning.

Pursuing this line of autobiographical discovery further, I askedmyself questions about the development of the ideas on clinicalpsychological testing, and I found earlier signs of my impatiencewith the formalistic limits imposed by adherence to themetapsychological preoccupations.These constraints had been centralto David Rapaport’s mentorship, beginning in 1943, when he wasdoing his pioneering work on diagnostic psychological testing at theMenninger Clinic and he hired me, fresh out of college, to be hisresearch assistant and clinical intern. Rapaport’s groundbreaking workon testing focused on differential diagnosis derived from thepatterning of test scores and other formal aspects of test responses.He believed that these features of the test protocols would differsystematically from one diagnostic group to the next. As presentedin Diagnostic Psychological Testing (Rapaport, Gill, and Schafer,1945–1946), Rapaport’s expectations were borne out for the mostpart, and many subsequent generations of psychologists havebenefited greatly from his work. In this approach, however, dynamiccontent was systematically subordinated to structural and functionalpropositions, the result being that fleshed-out psychological portraitsof each patient cannot—should not—be developed (despiteRapaport’s keen sensitivity in this regard).

Once I was working autonomously, however, I began to changethis approach. First in an army hospital around the end of the Second

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World War, then back at the Menninger Clinic as chief of adult testing,and later in the same position from 1947 to 1953 at the Austen RiggsCenter, and at the Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatryfrom 1953 to 1961, I concentrated on including psychologicalportraiture in my reports and those of my trainees. Although theportraits still included formal analysis of ego structures andfunctions,they were not limited to them and their diagnosticimplications. Here, then, was early evidence of restlessness existingside by side with my eagerly compliant absorption of Rapaport’steaching and example.

I also see now that in this new way I was trying to bring my clinicalwork closer to the work of clinical analysts, for it was my dream thatsomeday I would become an analyst that had led me into the study ofpsychology while still an undergraduate. Unfortunately, owing to mylack of an M.D., that goal seemed out of reach during those years. Asa nonmedical clinician I could not be accepted for training withinthe American Psychoanalytic Association, which is where I believedI would get the kind of training I longed for. That dream entered intomy writing the book Psychoanalytic Interpretation in RorschachTesting (1954). That book was followed by a series of similarlyanalytic papers (e.g., “How Was This Story Told?” and “Bodies inSchizophrenic Rorschach Responses”), papers I collected andpublished in Projective Testing and Psychoanalytic Theory (1967).Rapaport’s increasingly critical response to these excursions werehurdles I had to struggle to get over.

Thus, I now believe that whatever I have subsequently tried tocontribute to psychoanalysis itself has been the joint product of mypreoccupation with interpretation and my conflictual stance towardreceived wisdom. I see this in my later direct challenges of Freudianmetapsychology (1976, 1978, 1983). I found a similar cross-currentin the ground-breaking work of Heinz Hartmann; I saw him asoccupying a mixed role, serving as both a steward of received wisdomand a constructive challenger of it. I took up my reflections onHartmann in several publications (1963, 1970, 1976, 1997a). Withall the changes that have taken place in the manifest emphases of mywork, there remains a mix of profound respect for the traditional anda strong impulse to challenge it, improve it, and if necessary, changeits focus. I feel free to emphasize this cross-current on the strength

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of my conviction that this kind of personal acknowledgment has nobearing on the merit of my critiques and my suggested revisions orrejections of what has been handed down from the past.

Following the institution in the 1950s of the Research Candidateprogram by the American Psychoanalytic Association, I received fullclinical training in psychoanalysis between 1954 and 1959 at thenewly organized Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.Soon I was teaching theory courses at that Institute: . I continued toteach there until I left in 1975; however, once I had been appointedtraining and supervising analyst in 1968, I was able to take on someclinical teaching, too (“Clinical Uses of the Dream,” for example),and also supervision of candidates. In 1975, I left New Haven to bethe first Freud Memorial Professor at University College London,and then, in 1976, I returned to the United States as a professor ofpsychology in psychiatry at the Cornell University School ofMedicine in New York City. Soon thereafter I was appointed Trainingand Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center forPsychoanalytic Training and Research. In 1979 I left Cornell andbegan full-time private practice.

Throughout my training, teaching, and practice of psychoanalysisI have remained preoccupied with questions about interpretation.What is the process by which psychoanalytic understanding isdeveloped? In what sense or to what extent is it a product ofobservation in the manner of straightforward, empirical, laboratory-type fact-finding? In what sense or to what extent is that understandingdetermined, controlled, or guided by theory, that being the relationshipcustomarily emphasized in psychoanalytic writings on theory inrelation to practice? To what extent have hypotheses, as aspects ofthe theory, been presented as empirical knowledge? How much is afunction of each analyst’s sense of psychic reality?

New questions arose: What is one to make of profoundly differentapproaches to interpretation, each of which has been put forward byits proponents in compelling fashion and with strong claims oftherapeutic efficacy? Compelling though they are, each remainssubject to critique from the points of view of other schools of thought,so that it seems there can never be a last word on the matter. And yeteach approach recommends itself as the best. These heterogeneousdevelopments presented me with much to puzzle over. I came to

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believe that there is no escape from comparative psychoanalyticdebates and their inconclusiveness; that is to say, pluralism seems tobe the inevitable condition of our continuously developing discipline.Along with pluralism comes frequent reliance on persuasive rhetoricin place of comprehensive and accurate scholarship and logicalargumentation.

I did not get to any of these questions purely by independentreflection on practice and by my readings in psychoanalysis. All alongI have been greatly stimulated by continuing reading of literarycriticism, historiography, and philosophy; for in these intellectualpursuits there constantly recur questions of interpretation, evidence,knowledge, and the roles of theory and biased argumentation. Howdo we know what we think we know? Can there be any knowledgethat is not, in some sense, already interpretation? When are wejustified in speaking of truth? Call it epistemology, call itmethodology, call it both or something else, these and similarquestions extend as far back in human thought as we have evidenceof reflective thinking. David Rapaport used to call his joining thislong tradition, “Thinking about thinking.”

It is in this wide realm of study that one encounters what I regardas fruitful theses about and debates over hermeneutics, narration,language games, perspectivism, constructivism, dialogue, “the humansciences,” deconstruction, indeterminacy, incommensurability, andso on. All along, I have been trying to use them in thinking aboutpsychoanalytic interpretation. The reader will find in each of mybooks a range of references to my sources; these references havechanged to some extent as I have moved along in time and theme.

Although it is possible that, from any point of view, I have failedto do full justice to each of these developments, I do think that in myown way I have helped establish with some success the position thatone can understand the psychoanalytic process and the role in it ofinterpretation only by viewing both of them in the context of ourcurrent, changing intellectual movements and debates. Freud favoredthe mechanistic, empiricist, objectivist context of scientific thinkingof his time: Hartmann was of his time. Our challenge is to be equallyresponsive to our time and its controversies.

On the basis of my extended explorations, I began trying toreformulate the preferred mechanistic language of Freudian

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metapsychology. By the end of the 1960s it had come to seem to methat this language was tied to the past in a way that showed increasingsigns of scholastic niggling and sterility. Step by step I thoughtthrough and proposed a language based on the idea of action as ithad been developed in philosophy (1976). The concept of action canbe used in a broad sense that includes such cognitive processes asthinking, remembering, implying, speaking, etc.; in other words,action put to use as a term to cover a lot more than physical movementin the world, action as including anything of which one can say thatsomeone does it for a reason or on the basis of beliefs and intentions.Reasons, beliefs and intentions may, of course, be developedconsciously, preconsciously, or unconsciously. This shift of languageto an action language gets away from the noun-based, essentialistlanguage of drive, energy, structure, and mechanism. It favors a verb-and-adverb-based language of doing, of process, of purposive internaland external behavior. One must take an operational view ofpsychoanalysis and its concepts and hypotheses to realize how muchpsychoanalytic interpretation is focused on defining the complexreasons for what people do.

I consider this language shift to be supported by the changesinduced by effective analysis. To a large extent these changes centeron altering the analysand’s sense of self in the direction of personalagency; the patient more or less moves away from excessive, largelydefensive, often masochistically pursued victimization ormanipulation by circumstances or by external forces—being actedupon rather than acting. This change toward agency both requiresand furthers altered representational activity concerning the self andthe surrounding world, past and present. It favors a different versionof self-in-relationship. The turn to action language does not implythat everything in human existence is action or only action; nor is itimplied that activity is always preferable to passivity. It is the balancethat usually shifts as a result of psychoanalysis.

Further, action language neither implies nor requires a newtechnique. It is a way of reformulating traditional psychoanalyticwork, not changing it. Its advantage lies in its not being burdenedwith superimposed, highly abstract, essentialistic propositions. It iscloser to the psychoanalytic process than the classical formulations.It remains, however, only one of a number of possible versions of

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the process. The language of traditional metapsychology remainsanother option.

I also came to believe that psychoanalytic interpretation is carriedout in a hermeneutic fashion. The interpretive process derivesmeanings from the Patient’s associations and dialogue with thepsychoanalyst. That derivation goes beyond what can be gleaneddirectly from what is manifest. It works from context to specificdetails and from details back to context. It moves from more generalconcepts to more particular concepts and back again. The interpretiveprocess establishes reasons, not causes. It is a constructive process,and its building materials are inferences shaped from above andbelow.

Freud’s writings show that he recognized that psychoanalyticcausality is not predictive; it is postdictive, in which respect itsaccounts of normal and abnormal development, however persuasive,must be regarded as underdetermined. Also, Freud described andjustified reconstruction in what I take to be hermeneutic terms (1937).

I move on now to my next step. According to accepted philosophicdiscussion, an action exists only under a description. “Under adescription” specifies that we have only versions of actions, therebeing no language-free means of specifying each of them. Forpurposes of discourse, we deal only with accounts of actions mediatedby language, and inevitably, that language reflects a point of view.For example, a man jogging may be: jogging, itself a descriptionfrom a point of view; exercising; looking after his health or fitness;preparing for a marathon; hurrying to meet someone. Each descriptionmay be accepted as factual or true and yet each contextualizes theaction differently and leads to different consequences in furtherdiscourse. Therefore, it seemed correct to me to carry this thoughtfurther: stating an action amounts to narrating it (Schafer, 1983,1992).

Like “action,” “narration” can be construed in a broad sense. Oneneed not use the concept narration in its conventional narrow senseof telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end; instead, onemay use narration to designate the telling of anything. This one maydo in recognition of the fact that the action of telling can beaccomplished in different ways and lead to different consequences.Even a rock: just a rock, in another context an obstruction or ageological specimen or a place to sit down. No one word or phrase

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does it all. The point is that we do use language flexibly to stay incontext or to establish or alter a context. We narrate to others and toourselves. Our verbal thinking is narrational so that even the choiceof a name for a thing or event implies and might require followingone narrative direction taken than another.

We may link this usage to the regular psychoanalytic observationthat, over the course of an analysis analysands produce variousaccounts of themselves, of others, of their past and present situationsand actions, and of their hopes and fears. In all this, one can recognizethat analysts are listening to tellings or narratives of experience, pastand present. We may go on to say that the analyst’s interpretationsare narrative responses to what the analysand has been telling; theymay be said to be retellings. They reshape and further elaborate theanalysand’s narratives so as to develop richer, more complex, moreemotion-laden meanings. These meanings pertain to antecedents,consequences, imaginings, forbidden alternatives, or fantasies farremoved from conventional reality, these meanings constitute thepatient’s psychic reality so-called. As a rule, everyday versions ofkey psychoanalytic concepts are used in these retellings (for example,“protect yourself,” “ward off,” “block” for defense).

This line of thought encouraged me to subsume action languagein a narrational formulation of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis as aseries of tellings and retellings, a special kind of dialogueprogressively reorganized along lines consistent with key variablesin specifically psychoanalytic understandings (1983, 1992).

As with actions under a description, no question of conventionallyunderstood truth or fiction is implied in making this conceptual step.For the analysand’s account, however defensive, fragmented, orillusion-dominated it may be, is still taken as real; its interpretationby the analyst is another version of that reality, one that is designedto facilitate change by furthering self-understanding.

It must be kept in mind, however, that the retelling is only onepossible version of the truth. In the case of psychoanalysis, a versionis developed with the hope that it is better designed to promotebeneficial change than the analysand’s original account. It is lesseither/or and less simplistic; it is less fantasy-ridden or emotionallyinflamed; it is morer carefully reasoned, showing more reciprocitywith others; it is less provocative of anxiety, shame, guilt, rage, orother such painful or threatening responses; in general, it is a product

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of reflective thought, though it may be presented in the simplest ormost concrete terms.

A narrative view of the analytic process is not an alternative to anaction view. Narration and dialogue—telling and retelling—rest onthe shoulders of my earlier critiques of Freud’s metapsychology andmy recommended shift to action as the focus of psychoanalyticdiscourse. Narratives tell of actions.

Another turn in my thinking about interpretation: Since the 1970s,I have given much thought to feminist critiques of language, literature,and society, and in recent years I have tried to take into accountcontributions on gay and lesbian experience. This material has beenabsorbed into my reflections on action and narration. My publicationsin this realm, included in several of my books (1983, 1992, 1997a),attest to how richly my having taken this tack has contributed to myideas about psychoanalytic interpretation.

I come next to my having developed in recent years a strong interestin the contemporary Kleinians of London (Schafer, 1997a, 1997b).In this respect there would seem to be significant discontinuity inmy line of thought. But I think otherwise. Technically, these Kleiniansaim to work as much as possible through interpretation, most of allinterpretation of transference, in which respect they adhere closelyto the classical tradition. In my own clinical work I have neverbasically challenged this tradition. Additionally, it seems to me thatthe contemporary Kleinians’ equally important emphasis oncountertransference is primarily in the service of better understandingthe transference; for they view much of the countertransference asbeing stimulated and controlled by the analysand’s projectiveidentifications, thus as further revelations about the analysand’semotional position in the analytic relationship. They do, of course,recognize that there are personal sources of countertransference alongwith the sources ascribed to the analysand. There is no basis otherthan prejudice for the widespread stereotype among United Statesanalysts that Kleinians automatically ascribe all countertransferenceto the analysand’s efforts to cope with their problems.

Further on technical matters: The contemporary Kleinians ofLondon’s intense preoccupation with the moment-to-momentfluctuations and developments in the tone or atmosphere of thepsychoanalytic relationship takes into account words, metaphors,movements, silences, tempo, tones of voice, timing, sequence, and

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whatever else may be used as actions that are a source of informationor taken as indirect communications. From these observations theyderive interpretations of unconscious fantasies (phantasies in theirspelling). They understand those phantasies to be organizing anddisorganizing factors in the analysand’s actions in the analytic session.They do not assert that everything is unconscious transferencephantasy and that external reality is irrelevant; rather, they proceedon the assumption that the important, efficacious, beneficial, analyticinterventions revolve around the interpretation of the analysand’sunconscious experience of reality situations, mostly the realitysituation of verbal and nonverbal dialogue with the analyst. In this,the Kleinians remain close to Freud. They do not bombard theanalysand with interpretations; often they contain their understandingand introduce it to the analysand with tact, timing, and dosage; thatis, to say, they take into account the analysand’s readiness tounderstand and be understood (see Joseph, 1983).

I found this method of analysis easy to adopt as I had already beenshifting toward the experience-near here-and-now potentials of egopsychology. I had found my models for that shift in the followingplaces: my training and experiences in psychotherapy at the AustenRiggs Center (1947–1953), where I worked primarily with youngpatients of the “borderline” and “severe narcissistic disorder”varieties; my psychotherapeutic work with hospitalized schizo-phrenics in the Yale Psychiatric Institute and my supervision of thework of others in that setting; similarly direct and supervisory workwith late-adolescent college students at the Yale Student HealthCenter; my psychoanalytic training in the open-minded Western NewEngland Institute for Psychoanalysis; my extensive readings in theclinical literature, which contains dramatic instances of that kind ofego-psychological work; my reading of the self psychologists’ specialkind of object-relational work; and finally my theoretical work onaction language, narration, and dialogue. All of these models andprojects intensified my focus on unconscious phantasy, conflict, theconstruction of subjective experience, and the shaping of the moment-to-moment experience of the analytic relationship. I think I was verywell prepared to integrate my approach with that of the neo-Kleinians.

Thus far I have bypassed the issues raised by the general theory ofKleinian analysis. The principal issue concerns continued adherenceto the concept of Life and Death Instincts as the driving forces of

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human development and the key elements in psychological conflict.I will not elaborate these propositions as I see no value in postulatesof that general kind, neither in Kleinian thought nor as Freudianconcept’s. The point of view that emphasizes implications of sexand aggression as pervasive in human existence is another matteraltogether, and it is one that I do accept as an essential workingprincipal of clinical psychoanalysis. For the rest, I work with all thewell-established concepts pertaining to defense, anxiety, guilt,conflict, shame, and so on. For me, that is theory enough. I see noneed for theories of basic driving forces. What matters to me is howto conceptualize how the mind works, not why it works or what makesit work. Leaving aside its instinct theory, I value the Kleinian versionof an object relations theory, a version that emphasizes primarilyunconscious phantasy concerning human relations between the selfand others; this version is far removed from that which leads to astraightforward, commonsensical, interpersonally oriented set ofinterpretations.

Finally, another point of criticism: I consider it no longer necessaryto accept Melanie Klein’s assumptions about highly developed, inbornphantasies and prestages of phantasies that develop in the first monthsof life. Without these assumptions, one can still apply the best thinkingof the contemporary British Kleinians (Schafer, 1997b). In fact, I donot believe that these analysts no longer vigorously espouse in theirown writings those overambitious reconstructions of earliestdevelopment. Instead, I read them as preferring concepts that focuson basic words in discourse on human experience—such words asdependency, mourning, envy, hatred, idealization, denial, goodness,love, concern, self.Further, I read them as organizing these conceptswithin the framework of Klein’s two basic psychological positions,the more primitive one being the paranoid-schizoid and the moreadvanced the depressive. These analysts use additional terms thatretain a technical ring—such words as splitting, reparation, manicdefense, pathological organization, and projective and introjectiveidentification. Any of these terms pertain to defensive operations andare, in my opinion, highly compatible with the classical understandingof ego-psychological Freudian analytic work. Perhaps the majordifference between the two approaches is the very strong andpersistent neo-Kleinian focus on the narcissistic foundations of

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personality, in particular on the faults in these foundations that causemuch of the grief of object relations and their growth toward andthrough the Oedipus complex and the formation of the maturesuperego. In recent years, however, this difference has been shrinkingas ego psychologists have focused much more attention on pre-oedipaldevelopment, too.

To conclude my psychoanalytic memoir: After having publishedextensively every step of the way and over many years, I look backnow at the present summary of the development of my ideas onpsychoanalysis and see it as, at best, a flimsy sketch or a hastyintroduction to my life in this great and invaluable discipline ofpsychoanalysis. I have presented little more that headlines to makeunderstandable or assimilable the path I have followed and the leaps(if that is what they are) that I have made along the way. I hope to goon, where I can, trying to fill in, expand and polish and also to confrontnew problems when and where I find them. In this undertaking, mymodel remains, as always, Sigmund Freud, with assists from KarlAbraham, David Rapaport, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, MelanieKlein, Betty Joseph, and so many other great analysts—too many tolist all at once.

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Erikson, E. (1950), Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.Freud, S. (1937), Constructions in analysis. Standard Edition, 23:255–270. London:

Hogarth Press, 1964.Joseph, B. (1983), On understanding and not understanding. Internat. J.

Psychoanal., 64:291–298.Rapaport, D., Gill, M. M. & Schafer, R. (1945–1946), Diagnostic Psychological

Testing, Vols. 1 & 2. Chicago: Yearbook Publishers.Schafer, R. (1954), Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing. New York:

Grune & Stratton. (1959), Generative empathy in the treatment situation. Psychoanal. Quart.,

28:342–373. (1960), The loving and beloved superego in Freud’s structural theory. The

Psychoanal. Study of the Child, 15:163–188. New Haven: Yale University Press. (1964), The clinical analysis of affects. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 12:

275–299. (1967), Projective Testing and Psychoanalytic Theory . New York:

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(1970), An overview of Heinz Hartmann’s contributions to psychoanalysis.Internat. J. Psychoanal., 51:425–446.

(1976), A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.

(1978), Language and Insight: The Sigmund Freud Theorial Lectures,University College London, 1975–1976. New Haven: Yale University Press.

(1983), The Analytic Attitude. New York: Basic Books. (1992), Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis. New

York: Basic Books. (1997a), Tradition and Change in Psychoanalysis. New York: International

Universities Press. (1997b), The Contemporary Kleinians of London. New York: International

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241 Central Park West #1ANew York, NY 10024

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