In this provocative and brilliant book, Roy Schafer offers a radical reconceptualization of Freudian metapsychology. When Freud wrote about his discoveries of the unconscious and the nature of psychic processes, he used the language of the prevailing scientific theories of his time--energy, force, and mechanism. In contrast, Schafer sees psychoanalysis as an interpretive discipline, a human science that requires a language of its own, unencumbered by the old natural science concepts.

Schafer proposes a new language for psychoanalysis, freed from the ambiguities and biases of...

Here is the long-awaited new book by the influential, always provocative psychoanalyst, Roy Schafer. It focuses on a vacuum that has developed between psychoanalysis and critical thinkers in the social sciences and humanities. Schafer's goal is to weave psychoanalytic discourse into the tapestry of modern trends in intellectual history, notably linguistic and hermeneutic approaches to interpretation.The manner in which we "narrate" our lives is the central theme of psychoanalytic discourse and a critical issue for all of us, Roy Schafer argues. Narrating, giving an account, presenting a...

Bad feelings are ubiquitous to human experience. Everyone deals with grief, envy, disappointment, dejection, humiliation, mortification, and anxiety. However, when we consciously push troubling feelings aside and then avoid them, we should be under no illusions that such repression empowers us to lead untroubled lives. The price that we pay, simply, is feeling less alive.
Our attempts to avoid feeling pain manifest themselves in feelings of disconnection and numbness. To make matters worse, bad feelings often bring moralistic self-condemnation that arises unconsciously or even...

Everyone experiences bad feelings - guilt, shame, humiliation, envy and more. Yet despite the fact that such emotions are a common occurrence, these painful feelings are often labelled as wrong, a moralistic determination that can complicate existing problems in the individual's emotional life. Through careful research and assessment of psychoanalytical methods, this book offers a new understanding of how painful emotional states can find relief through the talking cure.

This is a collection of published and unpublished papers on clinical, theoretical and applied aspects of psychoanalysis that take up various aspects of unconscious mental processes and conflicts and their expression in the clinical transference and countertransference. These expressions are evidenced, in frustration, gratitude and benevolence, competing feelings of being cared for and coerced, disturbed and expanded bodily pleasure, cruelty and forgiveness. Included in this book is a brief history of the author's odyssey through several major contributions regarding the language of...