Roy Schafer (December 14, 1922 - August 5, 2018) was an American psychologist and psychoanalyst, who emphasised a psychoanalytic concept of narrative.
[1] Roy Schafer was trained at the Menninger Foundation and Austen Riggs Center, then became Chief psychologist in the Yale Medical School Department of Psychiatry (1953–1961), subsequently a staff psychologist for Yale’s health service (1961–1976) during which time he was appointed Clinical Professor, and later Training and Supervising Analyst in the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (1968).
Melvin Belli called upon him as an expert witness for Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, whom he diagnosed as suffering organic brain damage that most likely involved psychomotor epilepsy.
He has received many honors, ranging from First Sigmund Freud Memorial Professor University College London (1975–76) to the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the International Psychoanalytic Association (2009).
Schafer began to present traditional psychoanalytical concepts not as scientific principles but as interpretative storylines.
In this view there is no single correct interpretation of a life story; rather, like other narrative constructions, such as poems or novels, the account lends itself to various understandings each of which can legitimately claim to be true while emphasizing another way of looking at it.
According to Mitchell's alternative view of Schafer's work, the value of an interpretation lies not in its objectivity or correctness, but in its potential for opening up new forms of experience and allowing the analysand to claim a deeper and broader sense of its own activity.
In psychoanalytic narration some people present themselves as regularly blaming themselves for being responsible for misfortunes and accidents in their lives; this is called excessive claiming of action.
Showing happens when the analysand conveys ideas, feelings, fantasies or reactions, verbal or non-verbal and freely associates these in an unselective way and without rehearsal.
[4] In Schafer's account the basic transformation in the analytic process is the analysand’s gradual assumption of agency with respect to previously disclaimed actions.