Problems in Freud's Psychology of Women.

Freud's ideas on the development and psychological characteristics of girls and women, though laden with rich clinical and theoretical discoveries and achievements, appear to have been significantly flawed by the influence of traditional patriarchal and evolutionary values. This influence is evident in certain questionable presuppositions, logical errors and inconsistencies, suspensions of intensive inquiry, underemphasis on certain developmental variables, and confusions between observations, definitions, and value preferences. Under three headings-The Problem of Women's Morality and Objectivity, The Problem of Neglected Prephallic Development, and The Problem of Naming-I discuss Freud's generalizations concerning ego and superego development in boys and girls, penis envy, biologically predestined procreativity, the role of the mother, the fateful linkages male-masculine-active-aggressive-dominant and female-feminine-passive-masochistic-submissive, and other topics as well.

Curse and consequence: King Lear's destructive narcissism.

Shock, pain and antipathy are common audience responses to King Lear's violent abuse of Cordelia in Scene 1 of King Lear; however, the play then shifts so rapidly to other dramatic relationships and events that it tends to push these feelings out of mind. This shift is here regarded as a seduction to repress the fear and antipathy aroused by Lear. This effect opens the way to sympathetic identification with him in his subsequent humiliation, suffering and madness.

The reality principle, tragic knots, and the analytic process.

Civilization and Its Discontents is shown to occupy a special place in Freud's development of psychoanalytic theory and technique. Especially emphasized is its implications for an inclusive understanding of the reality principle. The concept tragic knots is then defined and used to emphasize Freud's readiness to include tragic elements in that principle.

My life in testing.

This autobiographical essay describes my career as a psychodiagnostician, which began at the City College of New York in 1941 and ended in the late 1970s when I became a full-time psychoanalyst in Manhattan. As a green, 20-year-old psychology undergraduate, I was picked by Gardner Murphy to assist David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who was developing new methods for using psychological tests to diagnose and treat soldiers during World War II. Our findings were presented in the classic, two volume work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing, published in 1945-1946 (Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945-1946; 1968), to which I added two clinically enriched monographs: The Clinical Application of Psychological Tests, published in 1948 (Schafer, 1948/1995), and Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (Schafer, 1954), published in 1954.

Caring and coercive aspects of the psychoanalytic situation.

Certain ambivalent reactions to undergoing analysis add content and intensity to the analysand's transference and to some extent to the analyst's countertransference. A significant share of these reactions may be attributed to the structure of the psychoanalytic situation. Among other things, analysands' reactions feature fantasized and sometimes realistic experiences of being coerced by their analyst's counter-transferences.

Cordelia, Lear, and forgiveness.

Painful human interactions are often followed by urges to forgive, be forgiving, or seek forgiveness. The insight analysands develop into their transferences highlights their finding gratification in constantly reenacting painful interactions. Their new understanding can make forgiveness seem irrelevant; waiving the question of forgiveness might then seem the wiser course to follow.

Conflict: conceptualization, practice, problems.

Although intrapsychic conflict has proved its usefulness as an organizing concept in both theoretical and clinical discourse, it should be regarded as a narrative choice, for there exist other useful ways to address the relevant phenomena. Ignoring the narrativity of intrapsychic conflict opens the way to simplistic and anthropomorphic psychoanalytic discourse. Technical difficulties may result.

Defenses against goodness.

This paper examines the fantasies and conflicts of analysands who avoid the experience and expression of positive reactions to the goodness of others and who hide feelings that would elicit that goodness. Envious wishes to spoil good objects, attachments to bad objects, defenses against gratitude and dependence, negative therapeutic reactions, and other such conflictual developments can help forestall depressive anxiety in these analysands. They dread abandoning narcissistic, omnipotent, sadomasochistic, and persecutory paranoidschizoid positions, and fear moving toward the mature depressive position, with its burdens of seemingly intolerable guilt, concern, felt ambivalence, and vulnerability to humiliation and disappointment.