A New Language for Psychoanalysis by Roy Schafer

A New Language for Psychoanalysis by Roy Schafer

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 mechanistic theory.  His formulation is based on the notion of action, were “action” is understood to mean the widest variety of human behavior: perceiving, organizing, fantasying, wishing, and doing—consciously and unconsciously.    In presenting his action language, Schafer first explains how it relates to metapsychology and the psychoanalytic vision of reality.  He presents a philosophically oriented model of the person as agent, one who does things for reasons and creates his or her own experiences and activities.  These formulations are applied to traditional topics in psychoanalysis: action, internalization, self and identity, motivation and the explanation of behavior, and the idea of resistance in analysis.  In a final section, concerned with emotions, the author furnishes clear and logical ways of understanding speaking about love, hate, fear passivity, and other basic emotional experiences.

Schafer, Roy: - Roy Schafer has 60 years of experience as a psychoanalytic therapist, during which time he has been an active teacher in his own Institutes and a guest lecturer and teacher in many others in the U.S. He has received many honors from his colleagues. He has contributed to numerous English language psychoanalytic journals and his books and articles have been translated into several languages. He has held academic positions as Clinical Professor at Yale and Cornell University Medical Schools. He was the first Freud Memorial Professor 1975-76 at University College London.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300027617
ISBN 10	0300027613
Title	A New Language for Psychoanalysis
Author	Roy Schafer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	1981-09-10
Number of pages	394
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.