Roy Schafer

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).

His early work focused on psychological testing. 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. His first publications were on diagnostic psychological testing and included the very influential Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (1954). He later wrote on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in works including Aspects of Internalization (1968), A New Language for Psychoanalysis (1976), The Analytic Attitude (1983), Retelling a Life (1992), The Contemporary Kleinians of London (1997), Bad Feelings (2003), Insight and Interpretation (2003), and Tragic Knots in Psychoanalysis (2009).

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). He was recruited to New York City to join the full-time faculty at Cornell University, Medical College in 1976. In 1979, he established a private practice in New York City. He has remained a clinical professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research since that time.

Roy Schafer (December 14, 1922 - August 5, 2018) was an American psychologist and psychoanalyst, who emphasised a psychoanalytic concept of narrative. For Schafer, an important purpose of the analytic process is that the analysand regains agency of her own story and of her own life. Psychoanalyst and analysand each have a role in telling and retelling the analysand's life story: the analyst helps the analysand by elevating subjectivity as awareness of multiple interpretations.