Psychological Tests Don't Think: An Appreciation of Schafer's Psychoanalytic Interpretation In Rorschach Testing

Roy Schafer 's Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing has, for nearly 40 years, represented a hallmark of psychodynamically informed psychological assessment. In this article, Schafer's contribution is reviewed in light of recent contributions to the Rorschach literature. Following a summary of the main sections of the work, Schafer's approach to the Rorschach is critically re-examined from the perspective of modem assessment practice. Differences between the epistemological bases of psychoanalytic and empirical methods of Rorschach interpretation are highlighted, and the prospects for an integration of these two approaches are considered. It is concluded that Schafer's contribution remains as fresh today as when written 40 years ago.     

ROY SCHAFER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING: FROM CLINICAL SENSIBILITY TO THE ANALYTIC ATTITUDE

The author reviews Schafer's contributions to psychological testing, emphasizing his development of the test battery, his significant contributions to psychoanalytically oriented Rorschach interpretation, and his understanding of the complex interpersonal dynamics involved in psychological test interpretation. The author also discusses his use of Schafer's writing in his own teaching and academic work, noting that Schafer's contributions have not only provided innovative methods for examining test data, but have also promoted a respectful, humanistic, and individualized approach to the patient in testing and treatment. The author asserts that Schafer's later seminal contributions to psychoanalysis had their origins in his early career as a psychologist applying psychoanalytic ideas to testing.     

ROY SCHAFER: A BEGINNING

The author provides a biographical overview of Schafer's life, culled from his published work and focused primarily on his professional development. This biography is used to demonstrate some of Schafer's central theoretical insights on narrativity and language, and reveals the consistency of his thinking over his long career. A brief discussion of his writing on King Lear provides a bridge between theoretical and biographical material.     

APPRECIATING DIFFERENCE: ROY SCHAFER ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND WOMEN

The author describes and appreciates Roy Schafer's critique of Freud's view of female psychology and his other contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on women, noting his then‐novel emphasis that took into account social and cultural factors in analytic treatment. She relates the influence on Schafer's work of his ambiance in that era: the Yale University Student Health Services during the social turmoil of the 1970s (where she was his supervisee), with the university becoming coed, as well as the theoretical plurality even in the early days of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.     

The Contributions of Roy Schafer and Donald Spence to the Study of Narrative

This review considers the sense given to the term "narrative" in the work of Roy Schafer and Donald Spence. Roy Schafer's interest in narrative came through his concept of action language, which was an attempt to challenge and revise traditional Freudian metapsychology. Emphasis upon narrative has given Schafer a new view upon traditional theory and practice. Although Spence is equally iconoclastic and challenging, his use of the term differs markedly from Schafer's. The study contrasts the different positions Spence and Schafer arrived at through exploration of narrative, particularly their different attitudes to the problem of verifiability.     

Development of Objective Scoring Methods for Longitudinal CAT Data

Previous research has suggested that content analysis of the Rorschach may be a useful tool in diagnosing homosexuality. The present study selected three groups of 15 Ss as: Heterosexual, sex-role disturbed, and homosexuals. A content analysis of the Rorschach protocols using Schafer's signs was performed. The results indicated that the signs were highly successful in differentiating the three groups. Implications for further research were discussed.     

THE VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY

The author discusses some of the characteristics of Roy Schafer's contributions to psychoanalysis that he finds most valuable, such as his openness to uncertainty, his anti‐reductive view of analytic constructions, his unique formulation of the analyst's role, and his close attention to how the patient engenders particular emotional reactions in the analyst. The author also presents a clinical vignette illustrating the value of the analyst's tolerance of uncertainty in the face of the patient's push for interpretations, explanations, and reassurance.     

THE SECOND SPHERE AND THE STORY OF NO STORY

The author discusses Roy Schafer's ideas of the second self and second reality, as well as his consistent theme of storyteller and story. The latter theme is also explored in the context of more recent psychoanalytic influences, such as Bionian thought, trauma theory, the French approach, and the interpersonal perspective. To illustrate the idea of the nonstory in today's clinical encounters, the author presents two clinical vignettes.     

ROY SCHAFER: A NARRATIVE

The author provides a brief overview of the papers given at the Schafer Symposium in October 2012 by the following six presenters: Henry Schwartz, Richard Fritsch, Rosemary Balsam, Lucy LaFarge, Michael Feldman, and Jay Greenberg. He also highlights some important ongoing themes in Schafer's writing, including theory—about which Schafer takes a unique position—history, and ideas from other disciplines. Schafer prefers continuing explorations over arriving at conclusions, the author notes, and believes that students should remain faithful to their mentors' thinking—until it is time for them to move beyond it.     

Rorschach Differentials of Homosexuality in Male Convicts: An Examination of Wheeler and Schafer Signs

In an attempt to cross-validate the Wheeler and Schafer signs of homosexuality in the Rorschach, the present study made use of 60 male adult convicts of a Calcutta jail, divided into four equal groups: active homosexual, passive homosexual, sex-role disturbed and heterosexual normals. The protocols of the individually administered Rorschach were examined for both Wheeler and Schafer signs of homosexuality. Statistical analyses revealed that while Wheeler's signs could differentiate only homosexuals (active and passive) and sex-disturbed convicts at .05 level of significance, Schafer's signs were able to differentiate most of the studied groups at level of significance varying between .01 and .05. Failure of the Schafer signs to distinguish between active and passive homosexuals as well as between sex-disturbed and heterosexuals is discussed with reference to the characteristics of prison subculture.     

God,Time, and Eternity

Abstract

Theologian Karl Rahner holds that in trinitarian theology and evolutionary conceptions of Christology and anthropology, personhood emerges as a dynamic function of being-in-relation. Integrating Rahner's insights with neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon's recent work on emergence provides a fresh framework for interpreting and developing Rahner's understanding of the manner in which created being subsists dynamically vis-à-vis infinite Being as such (the analogia entis), how one might conceive of God's creative activity or grace at work in evolutionary processes, and how Homo sapiens has evolved to bear the imago trinitatis—image of the Trinity—in a unique way.     

Prediction,Authority, and Entitlement in Shared Activity

Shared activity is often simply willed into existence by individuals. This poses a problem. Philosophical reflection suggests that shared activity involves a distinctive, interlocking structure of intentions. But it is not obvious how one can form the intention necessary for shared activity without settling what fellow participants will do and thereby compromising their agency and autonomy. One response to this problem suggests that an individual can have the requisite intention if she makes the appropriate predictions about fellow participants. I argue that implementing this predictive strategy risks derailing practical reasoning and preventing one from forming the intention. My alternative proposal for reconciling shared activity with autonomy appeals to the idea of acting directly on another's intention. In particular, I appeal to the entitlement one sometimes has to another's practical judgment, and the corresponding authority the other sometimes has to settle what one is to do.     

TAKING PRAGMATISM SERIOUSLY: A REVIEW OF WILLIAM BAUM'S UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIORISM: BEHAVIOR,CULTURE, AND EVOLUTION (SECOND EDITION)

This important book has two main purposes. The first is to present, in a non‐technical way, accessible to intelligent laypeople, a scientific, behavioral approach to all aspects of human activity including choice, rule‐governed behavior, self control, religious belief, linguistic interaction, ethics, and culture. Its scope equals that of Skinner's nontechnical writings, but Baum's approach is more molar and more pragmatic than Skinner's. The book's second purpose is to embed behavioral science firmly in the context of Darwinian evolution. Baum is generally successful, we believe, in both of these ambitious purposes.     

Finding Oneself Among the Saints: Thomas F. O'Dea,Mormon Intellectuals,and the Future of Mormon Orthodoxy

Thomas F. O'Dea's classic The Mormons identified “Mormonism's encounter with modern secular thought” as perhaps the church's greatest problem. In line with secularization theory, O'Dea predicted an attenuation of traditional Mormonism, and an adaptation and gradual liberalization of Mormon theology as the literal interpretation of Mormon origins “dissolved” in the solvent of modernity. O'Dea's views on the crisis facing Mormonism were based, in part, on ethnographic field work in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1950, as interpreted by a modernist Catholic sociologist. A review of his field notes suggests that key informants who “hosted” much of O'Dea's research activity were liberal Mormon academics who defined the church's traditional theology as a problem. This viewpoint agreed with O'Dea's preconceptions about the “education and apostasy” dilemma. A comparison of O'Dea's published “reading” of his field notes with the notes themselves suggests the plausibility of alternative readings. One such alternative is offered here, an interpretation of the interplay of education, Mormon theology, and Mormon intellectualism drawn from O'Dea's field notes, but with a different emphasis from that of his essay. Finally, reverting to a modernist perspective, I offer some hints from survey research suggesting that the predicted liberalization of Mormon theology has yet to occur.     

Concepts,structures, and meanings

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico‐mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule‐governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development.     

Memory,Quasi-memory,and Pseudo-quasi-memory

Bishop Butler objected to Locke's theory of personal identity on the grounds that memory presupposes personal identity. Most of those sympathetic with Locke's account have accepted Butler's criticism, and have sought to devise a theory of personal identity in the spirit of Locke's that avoids Butler's circularity objection. John McDowell has argued that even the more recent accounts of personal identity are vulnerable to the kind of objection Butler raised against Locke's own account. I criticize McDowell's stance, drawing on a distinction introduced by Annalisa Coliva between two types of immunity to error through misidentification.     

Hegel,Danto, Adorno,and the end and after of art

In this paper, I consider Adorno's claim that art is at, or is coming to, an ‘end’. I consider Adorno's account in relation to the work of Arthur Danto and G. W. F. Hegel. I employ Danto's account, together with two distinct interpretive glosses of Hegel's account, as heuristic devices in order to clarify both Adorno's own arguments, and the context within which they are being advanced. I argue that while Danto and Hegel see art as coming to an end autonomously, owing to art's successful realization of its governing principle, Adorno by contrast sees art as coming to an end heteronomously. Art's narrative is forcibly broken off, rather than completed. Adorno's account, indebted to Hegel, of art's commitment both to autonomy and the realization of ‘spiritual needs’ is explored in order to clarify how, on Adorno's view, this has happened to art; and why, precisely, he believes art is coming to an end.     

Swindell,Frankfurt, and ambivalence

J.S. Swindell has argued that Harry Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is ambiguous and that it fails to do justice to the full range of this psychological phenomenon. Building on her criticism of Frankfurt, Swindell offers an analysis of ambivalence which is supposed to clarify ambiguities in Frankfurt's analysis and reveal varieties of ambivalence that Frankfurt's analysis allegedly overlooks. In this brief reply, I argue that Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is neither ambiguous nor objectionably narrow. I conclude with remarks on Swindell's analysis of the relationship between ambivalence and weakness of the will.     

Timmermann,Forschler, and The Attempt to Bridge the Kantian‐Consequentialist Gap

Scott Forschler defends R. M. Hare's rationalist‐universalizing‐utilitarian moral approach against Jens Timmermann's critique of it. He argues that Timmermann fails to see that Kant's ethical rationalism might be consistent with utilitarianism, and argues that Timmermann merely assumes that Kant's deontology follows logically from his ethical rationalism. In Forschler's estimation, it has not been established that either Kant's or Hare's ethical rationalism is inconsistent with utilitarianism. This article, however, argues that, in his response to Timmermann on behalf of Hare's rationalist‐universalizing‐utilitarian approach, Forschler has overlooked something very significant at the foundational level of Hare's moral approach, and that this oversight undercuts his response to Timmermann. The analysis also invites a metaethical investigation of preference satisfaction as it is found in Hare's moral approach. The article uncovers some fundamental metaethical presuppositions in Hare's normative approach, presuppositions overlooked by Forschler.