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© The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2013Volume LXXXII, Number 1

rOy SCHaFer: a narraTIVe

By roBert MicHeLS

The author provides a brief overview of the papers given at the Schafer Symposium in October 2012 by the following six presenters: Henry Schwartz, Richard Fritsch, Rosemary Balsam, Lucy LaFarge, Michael Feldman, and Jay Greenberg. He also highlights some important ongoing themes in Schafer’s writing, including theory—about which Schafer takes a unique position—history, and ideas from other disciplines. Schafer pre-fers continuing explorations over arriving at conclusions, the author notes, and believes that students should remain faithful to their mentors’ thinking—until it is time for them to move beyond it.

Keywords: Roy Schafer, projective testing, Rorschach, psycho-diagnostics, femininity, evolution of analysis, uncertainty, ana-lyst’s role, analytic theories, history of analysis, interdisciplinary thinking, mentoring.

Roy’s genius was first displayed in his understanding that a psychologist should interpret a psychological test profile rather than merely report the results of psychological tests. He became well known for his work on projective tests such as the Rorschach, in which the subject is pre-sented with an intentionally ambiguous stimulus and the tester studies his responses to that stimulus. Roy’s insight was that perception of and responses to stimuli are actions that are shaped by the subject’s mind and that encompass the context and the relationship with the tester, as

Robert Michels is Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Cornell University and a Training and Supervising Analyst at Columbia University Cen-ter for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York.

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well as many other determinants. Responses to ambiguous stimuli can be richly understood within this framework.

Perhaps some readers will have noted that we are actually involved in a related research project with our discussions of Roy’s contributions. We are observing the construction of a new projective test. We have ex-amined six research subjects, each of whom has presented a response to an ambiguous stimulus—namely, the instruction to prepare a paper for a presentation at Roy Schafer’s festschrift. We have seen their responses to this stimulus in print. In this process, they have revealed something about themselves, and we have observed how they perceived the stim-ulus. Let us consider the results.

* * * * * * * *

Henry Schwartz starts by telling us the story of Roy’s life. In the pro-cess, he self-consciously goes out of his way to identify with Roy’s style. He says that there is no “correct” introduction to Roy. There are many possible introductions, and Roy would be the first to tell us that there is no “true” one that invalidates the others. Schwartz offers his version of the story, knowing that there are only versions of stories; there is no story that is not a version.

Henry introduces Roy first as a brilliant student, and then a con-servative, responsible, respectful rebel against his teachers, and suggests that this theme may go back to Roy’s earliest roots. In his intellectual au-tobiography (Schafer 2000), Roy told us about the roots of his work and his interest in interpretation, and about his family’s origin in the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. Roy remains respectful of authority, and yet unwilling to accept it without questioning it, challenging it, revising it, and improving it.

Richard Fritsch reviews Roy’s work in psychodiagnostics and the shift from psychological testing as measuring specific capacities and then re-porting data obtained from these measurements, to psychological testing as a clinical appraisal. It has often been said, by Roy among others, that he left his career as a psychodiagnostician behind as he moved more and more into the world of psychoanalysis. My view is that he transformed psychological testing into a form of comprehensive clinical analysis and then used that same process as a psychoanalyst clinician.

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Roy with a subject responding to a Rorschach card and Roy with an analysand associating on a couch are very much the same Roy, using the entire array of data available to think about the variety of ways in which they can be constructed into a narrative. Beware when you are in Roy’s presence—you are being analyzed, no matter what else you might think is going on.

Fritsch tells us that Roy spends only fifteen minutes in his prelimi-naries before starting a test procedure. I believe Roy would say that he starts the clinical process fifteen minutes before he hands the first card to the subject that he is evaluating. Indeed, having heard Roy discuss test protocols, I suspect he is almost through fifteen minutes after beginning, when the first card is just being offered.

Rosemary Balsam picks up several of Roy’s themes. One is his courage and skill in challenging what was considered revealed knowl-edge about femininity. Central was Roy’s openness to the larger world of culture, of ideas, of theories and knowledge outside of psychoanalysis, and his comfort in contextualizing his psychoanalytic thinking within that broader range of knowledge.

Rosemary brings Roy close to Galileo. He knows what the revealed truth is supposed to be, but he is compelled by his exposure to reality to say, “And yet.” Where Galileo says, “And yet it moves,” Roy says, “And yet women are brilliant, they are talented, they are competent, they are moral, and they are just a little bit better than the rest of us. We should recognize that, regardless of where else our theory might seem to lead us.”

Lucy LaFarge traces the evolution of psychoanalysis, starting with the application of a specific set of rules and principles to every patient and continuing to a procedure that is uniquely personal, open-ended, and involves exploring near-infinite possibilities. She talks about Roy’s con-cept of a second self that integrates what should be preserved from the traditional rules with the personal characteristics of the analyst.

And then, revolutionarily—in identification with Roy—Lucy wonders what might be next. She is writing a post-Roy chapter for Roy’s textbook. How do we analyze that which cannot be interpreted or understood? How do we deal with that which seems to be outside the boundaries of what our current thinking says we might be able to analyze? What is the

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story of no story, and how do analysts use that understanding in dealing with unrepresentable experiences?

She ends with a tragic perspective on the future of psychoanalysis: there may be limitations to what is analyzable, and perhaps we have to think about how to deal with them, what we can do about them.

Michael Feldman begins with Keats’s negative capability. He talks about being open to new experiences, new ideas, to changes in one’s thinking. He reflects in many ways themes that Lucy initiated, both in his theoretical thinking and in his clinical vignette. He wants us to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing, and sees Roy as a master in developing the ability to do this. Perhaps more than the ability to tolerate, Roy is a master in modeling for the patient the enriching potential of tolerating uncertainty and the creativity that this generates.

Jay Greenberg starts by reminding us that Roy is, at heart, a clinician. He emphasizes the tension between agency and activity, which—to use his term—are irreducible, and the need to feel understood. He points out that the very best interpretations may be those that do not make the patient feel better, because they do not give false certainty about the meaning of something, but rather open and support tolerance of uncer-tainty about many possible meanings, and the impossibility of selecting the right one among them.

Jay emphasizes that Roy has always been a critic, but a very conserva-tive critic, maintaining classical notions of the clinical process, the clin-ical ideas that are used in that process, and the content of the clinical work, while at the same time encouraging revolutionary ideas about the role of the analyst and the nature of psychoanalytic understanding.

* * * * * * * *

There are crosscutting themes that tell us about Roy. First, theory. Roy is a clinician at heart. This is important. Roy is famous as a theo-rist, but Roy’s interest in theory is as a tool for interpreting. The goal is not to construct a theory. The goal is to enrich the interpretive process. Theories are not designed to be true, or even testable; they are designed to give us a richer, more variegated, more creative basis for imagining possible interpretations.

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If you have a theory that you can prove is true, it is probably not relevant for psychoanalysis. The domain of psychoanalysis is that sphere of human experience in which certainty is not possible. If certain truth is possible, you need a neurologist and not a psychoanalyst. Theory is a tool for the clinical task.

Roy not only views theory as a clinical tool, but also has a clinical at-titude toward what theory is. For Roy, learning a theory is like meeting a person. It requires effort, listening, thinking, and trying to understand. Critiquing a theory is even more work. It requires not only understanding the theory, but also knowing what problem the theory was designed to address, and thinking back to what were the alternative ways that that problem could have been addressed, what were the options that were selected and discarded in constructing the theory?

It requires rethinking what other theories might be used in place of this theory, and what would be the effect, the advantages, the disad-vantages of each, and then tolerating the possibility that there are other interesting theories, even mutually contradictory ones. In his book The Contemporary Kleinians of London (1997), Roy pointed out the essential contradictions between ego psychology and Kleinian theory while em-bracing both, because of their clinical value in his work.

I think this is very much the way a Schaferian analyst approaches a patient. He does not look for hypotheses to be tested for their truthful-ness or their validity, but rather models to be explored for their potential creative value in the constructing of a clinical narrative. Theories for Roy are like people. They are to be understood in a variety of contexts, al-ways open to alternative contexts, never believed, never disbelieved, but simply used, valued, and then retained for potential future use.

Second, history. With this attitude toward theories, the history of the field is immensely important. If a theory is an answer to a question—a so-lution to a problem—then unless you can identify the context in which that problem emerged, you cannot really understand the theory. You cannot understand the theory by what it asserts without knowing what problem led to its development, how it solved that problem, and what new problems it created that then led to the necessity for new theories.

Third, ideas from other disciplines. It is no accident that we heard from our other presenters about philosophy and about the social con-

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text of feminist revolutions. Roy, very much the psychoanalyst, recog-nized that psychoanalysis deals with people who live in worlds, and that we must understand the meaning those worlds have to individuals as we proceed with our task of analyzing those individuals. He is interested in anything that demonstrates the creative interpretive activity of the human mind.

Fourth, Roy does not reach conclusions. He explores dialogues, and he tries to further and continue those dialogues. It is a rich intellectual tradition.

Finally, a lot has been said about Roy as mentor and as mentored. Roy has had some outstanding mentors—some of the creative leaders of our field. He has honored and respected them. He has been faithful and loyal to their thinking, and he has discarded it when it was time. He has had no hesitation in challenging, rejecting, and moving beyond their work—in my mind, thereby honoring them as true teachers rather than as authorities whom he was to follow as a disciple.

There is an old saying that a midget standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant. However, the saying continues, a flea in the hair of an astronomer cannot see as far as the astronomer. Roy gives us a third strand: that a giant standing on the shoulders of another giant can see farther than the first giant.

REFERENCES

Schafer, R. (1997). The Contemporary Kleinians of London. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.

———- (2000). The development of my ideas about psychoanalysis. In Changing Ideas in a Changing World: The Revolution in Psychoanalysis. Essays in Honour of Arnold Cooper, ed. J. Sandler, R. Michels & P. Fonagy. New York: Karnac, pp. 33-40.

Department of Psychiatry Weill Medical College of Cornell University 418 East 71 StreetNew York, NY 10021

e-mail: rmichels@med.cornell.edu