Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis: New Papers in Psychoanalysis

Whatever people may say about orthodoxy, it is essential to clean up rubbish. One can do so politely, and, most of all, one must do it with fairness.

Early in my analytic training, Adrienne Applegarth complained to me, in a moment of exasperation, that psychoanalysts never throw anything out. Sooner or later, as serious students of psychoanalysis, we find ourselves continually beset by a bewildering array of theories, part-theories, anti-theories, loosely held ideas and unmoored clinical approaches, innumerable old and new orthodoxies (psychoanalytic “schools”), and, in this country, a generally xenophobic approach to all of the above. It’s a mess. Post-Freud, who’s in charge here? No one, as it turns out. Psychoanalysis has burst the bonds of any reliable orthodoxy and splintered into many solar systems. How do we gain our footing as practicing analysts amid this cacophony? How do we know what’s true? How do we figure out what psychoanalysis is, and who we are as analysts?

In this review I hope to follow the development of Roy Schafer’s thinking as a profoundly serious psychoanalyst, someone with a convincing grasp of what psychoanalysis is, and who he is as an analyst. I see the arc of Schafer’s career as it is traced in Tragic Knots as having organized for him a potentially terminal, mind-numbing psychoanalytic pluralism into a reliably coherent theory, and, most important, as having established the position of “analyst” within the clinical situation in a convincing way. I will try to illustrate what he has been able to do and how he did it, based on Tragic Knots as part scholarly journey and part intellectual memoir. I want to show how Schafer, with impeccable scholarship and relentless inquiry, actually threw stuff out; he “cleaned up” in Kris’s terms, leaving us with a coherent vision of psychoanalysis that is there for the taking.

Where to start? In this one slim volume, Schafer has restated (narrated, actually), in a clear and elegant fashion, a professional lifetime of thought and action. By “thought” I am referring to his systematic grasp of psychoanalytic theory as he has culled it, and by “action” the way he has acted on it to re-form and extend its reach, as well as point out its limitations. The slimness of the volume belies the prodigious nature of both his intellect and his achievement. In what is puzzlingly placed as a last chapter that might better have led off the book (“The Author’s Odyssey: You Can Get Here from There”), Schafer writes modestly about his development as a psychoanalyst, reserving the designation “memoir” for something that in fact captures the essence of the whole book: “I have written extensively: first on testing, then more or less in turn on psychoanalytic ego psychology, an action language for psychoanalysis, feminist issues, narrative in psychoanalysis, and the contemporary Kleinians of London. This memoir traces the intellectual continuity that characterizes these writings and my continuing development as a psychoanalyst—my first ambition and great love” (p. 155; emphasis added).

Schafer identifies two “red threads” that run throughout his career and his “great love.” The first is his ongoing inquiry into the nature of interpretation (rather than metapsychology) as the primary site of meaning in psychoanalysis. The somewhat rueful (and related) second thread concerns “a conflict between a powerful wish to accept, master, and if possible to enhance received wisdom, and an equally powerful inclination to challenge that heritage and find it wanting” (p. 156). This is putting the challenge of a lifetime mildly. Schafer’s edge in Tragic Knots is his simultaneous devotion to what he has found valuable and enduring in his respected psychoanalytic ancestors, and his willingness to essentially and tactfully discard the rest. The careful construction of this sentence about his red threads captures his characteristic mix of devotion to and dissatisfaction with his “great love,” pointing as politely and fairly as possible to the uneasy and dynamic amalgam that it is. He has begun to unsettle us.

This tension is best captured in his fretful essay on Robert Fliess’s “The Metapsychology of the Analyst” (1942), a kind of Trojan horse chapter in which both of Schafer’s red threads light up. It is as much about Schafer’s struggle with how to position the analyst himself in relation to clinical theory as it is about Fliess and his wrestling match with metapsychology. Fliess was probably the first to tackle the subject of the part played by the analyst’s personality in psychoanalysis. Fliess “boldly favors” individualized accounts of the analyst at work rather than the usual “categorical accounts,” and in doing so attempts to buck the metapsychological discourse in which he is also hopelessly mired. Schafer’s commentary itself turns out to be a bold and somewhat chagrined critique of the stranglehold that a primary fealty to metapsychology once held over any real advance in mapping the contribution of the individual analyst to the analytic situation. He invokes the timeless (and tiresome) “Is it psychoanalysis?” question to illustrate the essential historical difficulty of moving a vital scholarly discourse with unquestioned objectivist, scientific requirements into the realm of creative thinking. He reminds us of the timelessness of the preservation vs. innovation dilemma in any serious undertaking, and of the personal and professional difficulties it caused him.

Simultaneously with his critique, Schafer points out that Hartmann, Fliess, and most of all Ernst Kris were at the forefront of tilting psychoanalysis from a force-centered drive psychology to a meaning-centered object relations theory, an effort he is admiring of and indebted to. With the move toward deepening a theory of interpretation and clinical work that increases awareness of the role of the analyst himself at the center, Schafer characterizes this historical period as “the beginning of an age of anxiety” (p. 142). I read this as the anxiety each of us encounters as we step from the classroom into the consulting room, and from the reassuring surround of mentors and ancestors into our own individual experience in doing the work of analysis. In mixing history, theory, and anxiety in this essay, Schafer enacts for us the fractious history of significant change in our field. We see it in his writing. Fliess is characterized as a “passionate theoretician” who inevitably tripped over the politically correct cloak of metapsychology while trying to talk about the analyst’s subjectivity.

At the conclusion of this essay Schafer mentions “disturbing, theory-derived formulations” that sustain a view of the analyst as impermeable and omniscient in a way that still suggests shell shock. His last word on the subject, and the abrupt end of this essay is, “No further comment” (p. 153). Schafer is graphically illustrating here what he means by having challenged received wisdom, and we are left thinking, “Thank god he persevered!” Schafer has picked up where Fliess and others have foundered, and finished the work of responsibly and systematically authorizing the analyst’s internal world. He has been very explicit at every step, however, that this undertaking has not been a revolutionary one, but rather a painstaking effort to develop “contemporary ways of formulating ‘traditional’ psychoanalytic thinking about the human mind, clinical technique, and the nature of the analytic process” (p. 47). Doth he protest too much? Probably not. There is much to be found and refound here.

As you may be thinking by now, Schafer’s trajectory through the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century of American psychoanalysis has also defined the central struggle for those of us who were “classically” trained and struggling to break new internal ground as analysts, wondering on the one hand about the extent to which theoretical “hypotheses . . . have been presented as empirical knowledge” and, on the other, “how much [of the way we make interpretations, and meaning] is a function of each analyst’s sense of psychic reality” (p. 159). While each of us has had to confront this dilemma individually as part of our own development, Schafer has moved us from outside to inside as a discipline, and established a clear focus on how meaning emerges in the analytic dyad. Many of us are also deeply indebted to him in this regard for bringing Klein and the modern Kleinians decisively into the American canon.

In fact, I think it fair to say that Schafer’s embrace of Kleinian clinical theory has rounded out his final psychoanalytic theory of mind as action. Fidelity to the specificity and force of unconscious conflict (the thing-ness of it) as it emerges in the transference-countertransference mix found full expression following his turn toward Klein and the contemporary Kleinians in the 1990s. He is quick to point out that this doesn’t represent a discontinuity in his thinking, but a necessary elaboration of it, which seems correct. He finally eschews “comparative psychoanalytic debates and their inconclusiveness” and steeps himself in a clinical theory of unconscious action that intersects and enriches his own theory of language (and mind) as action. He makes a subtle and convincing argument for the compatibility of modern Kleinian analysis and more traditionally ego psychological work, an alloy that seems to me to be much sturdier and richer clinically than either tradition on its own. The Kleinian influences in Schafer’s thinking have by this point been seamlessly interpolated into his own discourse, and appear in this book as fully integrated aspects of his work. Characteristically, in other words, Schafer’s full immersion in Kleinian thought has not sidetracked him; it exemplifies his devotion to “getting it right,” both theoretically and clinically/phenomenologically. His excellent discourse on “Talking to the Unconscious” and attunement to unconscious thought; concreteness; fluid boundaries; timelessness; the unconscious ambivalence of both analyst and analysand; the alienating effects of interpretation (“It is . . . not self-evident what contact means unconsciously to each participant” [p. 34]); conflict, “best approached as a center of distress, a hub into which or through which many of the analysand’s tendencies pass . . .” (p. 41); conflict and fantasy; the dangers of feeling understood (“it is well known that further psychic development doesn’t always feel like a good deal” [p. 55]); the coercive and concrete aspects of analytic interventions (“in unconscious fantasy the distinction between persuasion, seduction, coercion and surrender is not great” [p. 63]), the vicissitudes of gratitude, benevolence, and envy—all of this taken together communicates to the reader a vastly deepened understanding of unconscious processes and their impact (particularly the potential for negative impact) on both parties in clinical work. It communicates a great deal of what Schafer has uniquely become as an analyst.

There are also many descriptions in Tragic Knots of the impossible position of being an “analyst” straight up, given his or her own unconscious needs. For instance, he suggests that “the analyst’s/person’s need not to feel alone or lonely often comes with the condition that he or she is extending care and concern ‘from a safe distance’, i.e. solely from the position of ‘analyst’.” We can see him literally “figuring this out” as he writes: “It may be safer than the relationships the analyst believes can be established in his or her private life. It is in the thick of analysis of the transference that this safety often gives way to painful and bitter vulnerability. On the other hand, when intimacy at a distance is not colored by desperation, it may be a prerequisite for doing sound interpretive work. I think that is it” (p. 83; emphasis added). Here Schafer is engaging in his own idiom the analyst’s endless dilemma of where he sits psychically in the work, a question initially raised most poignantly (and inconclusively) by Freud in “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915).

Perhaps his greatest contribution, in my view, and the core of this book, is his reprise of the tragic vision in psychoanalysis. He has grounded us in “Freud’s final, realistic pessimism” (Friedman 2011). ¹ Much of what Schafer will say about tragedy and the tragic in psychoanalysis has been prefigured in his majestic and seminal essay “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Reality” (1970). Clinically, the tragic “subsumes hope, creativity, attainment of goals and gratification along with limitation, defeat, and despair. Its vision assumes striving for inclusiveness while burdened with conscious and unconscious ambivalence” (Knots, p. xiv). Realistically, gains in psychoanalysis are most often modest and hard-won. There is no room for idealization and strivings for perfection. “For the patient, then, analysis represents a rise toward the possibility of tragic experience” (1970, p. 47; emphasis added). This is Schafer’s highly articulated version of Freud’s view of analysis as the conversion of neurotic (stereotyped) misery to the possibility of common unhappiness (new experience). The same is true of tragic heroes in drama. “Oedipus, Antigone, Hamlet, or Lear, all must struggle toward that naked yet magnificent position. Its spirit is summed up in Hamlet’s ‘the readiness is all’” (Schafer 1970, p. 47).

Clinical psychoanalysis is in this sense the staging of a tragedy, with the analyst as dramaturge. The centrality of tragedy and tragic experience in its deepest sense is what makes Schafer’s work coherent and unique theoretically and clinically. In what is for me the most original and compelling psychoanalytic essay in this book, “Cordelia, Lear, and Forgiveness,” Schafer uses Cordelia’s portentous comments to her father—“Nothing, my lord” (I. i. 87) and “no cause, no cause” (IV. vii. 75)—the often trivialized bookends of the play, to establish her tragedy as on a par with Lear’s, or anyone’s. The ordinariness of tragedy is crucial to Schafer’s argument, and to his vision of psychoanalysis. His guiding internal mandate throughout his career with his “great love” has been to bring loftier philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts—metaphysical and metapsychological concepts, essentially—back to earth and squarely into the realm of physical and psychological action.

Roughly speaking, the designation “knots” in the book’s title refers to the internal sites of unavoidable mixes of gratification and pain within and between human beings, and the inevitability of enacting these conflicts. Schafer borrows the concept of tragic knots from Max Scheler (1954), who wrote on the subject of the tragic from a literary and metaphysical point of view and linked the concept of “values” to their inevitable compromise and destruction in everyday human drama. In Schafer’s view, the assertion of a value or an ideal, as in Cordelia’s offering a subjectively and morally correct “nothing, my lord” in response to Lear’s public bid for extravagant affection, often sets up a situation of “dreadful risk and disastrous results” (p. 4). We have to wonder here about psychoanalytic ideals. The tragically knotted (complex, overdetermined, conscious, unconscious) threads of Cordelia’s tragedy as Schafer reads it establish the leitmotif and central illumination of his ideas and his view of what is always at least in part tragic action in human relations.

Schafer links his concept of tragic knots with Freud’s ultimate view of the reality principle as expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). His reading of this essay doesn’t conform to the usual view that it represents Freud’s pessimistic outlook on Western civilization following a world war and mounting personal disappointments and losses, however. Schafer lists all of Freud’s major clinical and theoretical contributions between 1917 and 1929 (and they are substantial) to support his conviction that the darkness of war and hardship did not slow him down; on the contrary, the inevitability of adversity and facing it “squarely and adaptively” contributed to many of his major breakthroughs. “And so, by 1929, Freud had paved much of the way toward establishing for psychoanalysis a modern conception of reality” (p. 7; emphasis added). Schafer points us away from a facile conception of Freud as an ultimate pessimist. He wasn’t a pessimist; he was a realist, a modernist, essentially an existentialist, and soon we are seeing Schafer in the same light. We are also seeing Schafer at his word, preserving and deepening the best of traditional analytic thinking in his own idiom.

Subsequent chapters continue to trace Schafer’s devotion to theory and its discontents. Not surprisingly, as he follows Freud’s movement from external to internal reality, and “beyond the either/or mode that sharply separates subject and object and now and then” (p. 8), we see his emerging commitment to the fine points of intrapsychic process in patient and analyst, not excluding the analyst’s perhaps inevitable “entanglement in the knot being analyzed.” The knotted threads of Cordelia’s tragedy as Schafer reads it in “Cordelia, Lear, and Forgiveness” exemplifies for me the depth and agility of his clinical reasoning, and pulls together his view of tragedy. The essay is constructed around the ever vexing concept of forgiveness, a nonpsychoanalytic yet apparently indispensable concept allied (consciously) with the depressive position in clinical work. Schafer sets out to unpack Cordelia’s powerful emotional impact on the play’s audience, an approach notably at odds with the popular “good girl” reading favored by most critics and setting for the reader a tone of new discovery. He highlights Cordelia’s “no cause, no cause” after Lear’s acknowledged guilt at having wronged her, not as forgiveness but as having waived the question altogether. He argues that it was Shakespeare’s intention to highlight forgiveness and its being waived in the tragic action between Cordelia’s initial “Nothing, my lord” and “no cause, no cause” near the end of the play. Schafer suggests that Shakespeare is moving us “past the point” where terms like blame, guilt, and forgiveness will suffice, an observation that is as much or more Schafer as Shakespeare by this point. Schafer bears down on unconscious mental processes, and the impossibility of forgiveness in relation to serious abuse (as in the case of Lear and Cordelia), where talion law prevails. There is no being “sort of ” forgiving or unforgiving. He reminds us that a conscious “no cause,” and the waiving of forgiveness in a highly developed person, while momentarily liberating, belies a certainty of unforgivingness unconsciously. Schafer makes several important points at this juncture, among them that unconsciously “we do not engage in drawing fine distinctions or weighing degrees of this or that, so that the half her heart Cordelia takes from Lear into her future must at that moment also feel like her whole heart” (p. 130). By the conclusion of a piece of good analytic work, both analyst and patient will have “moved into an area of experience that includes this tragic aspect”: “Fully developed tragedies of this sort [a description which by this point in the essay includes both Shakespearean and ordinary human tragedies] transform us, the audience, into wrought-up and ambivalent witnesses of sad, even grotesque events, and they transport us while we are in this state to that place in subjective experience from which we view things simultaneously from several perspectives. Once there and knowing too much, we become so many more Cordelia’s, now positioned beyond the point of settling questions of blame, guilt, and forgiveness” (p. 131). Schafer orients us here to the fact that ultimately “settling” anything in psychoanalysis is out of the question. Psychoanalysis—the theory and the practice—is fundamentally and necessarily unsettling.

Finally, having captured in stark detail the feeling familiar to us all of “knowing too much” in a tragic situation, Schafer makes a direct appeal to us, his audience. He enjoins us to “think how it is with us”; to consider our old, still painful wounds, our persisting vulnerabilities, and the moment “when we will finally bow to the things we will never get over” (p. 134).

This is an example of his finest writing in my view, stirring and agitating us into a new experience of dramatic tragedy and personal tragedy. This is the wisdom we have received from Schafer. It is the deeply individual wisdom of an analyst committed to preserving and promoting what is essential in his “first ambition and great love” and politely and fairly jettisoning the rest. Shafer’s vision of tragedy and “tragic knots” has drawn on, recast, and offered to us everything important in his own formation and his own hard-won conclusions as an analyst.