Schafer orients his chapters around a concept that he calls “tragic knots.” The idea is complicated, but what I think he is getting at is that life, as it can be understood and studied in psychoanalysis and literature, can be experienced through impossible or tragic choices. These are not necessarily tragic in a heroic and fixed way, rather in the sorrowful recognition that reality limits sometimes in very unhappy ways. He also suggests that such tragic knots often have elements out of one's control and perhaps without the possibility of considering the outcome.
He illustrates this with the dilemma of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear. Cordelia loves her father and is asked to compete with her sisters to express devotion to their father beyond realistic possibility, but her personal integrity foreswears her participating in such distortion, leading to tragedy for her and her father. With that template, Schafer more directly enters into the field of the analytic setting.
Basseches, H.I. (2014). A Psychoanalytic Life. DIVISION/Rev., 10:13
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” (“The Author's Odyssey: You Can Get Here from There”, p. 155, emphasis added).
Kite, J.V. (2012). On Roy Schafer. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 60(4):851-859
