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Psychoanalysis is expanding in ways that could not have been foreseen at its onset. Previously held knowledge and truths are constantly being deconstructed and it has become increasingly difficult to organize around a dominant theoretical stance to explain human behavior and psychoanalytic treatment. The discourses of related social sciences and postmodernism are seeping into our theoretical constructs, dialogues, and treatment rooms. This is reflected in recent emphasis on relativism, narratives, signification, hermeneutics, relational concepts, multiple selves, and multiculturalism. The narratives and texts of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and others permeate psychoanalytic dialogues. Even the certainty of gender has been undermined and is conceived of by some as a necessary fiction that is imposed by the culture through power and language. It becomes one more signifier that creates experience. Although these narratives create, as is often intended, states of upheaval and uncertainty, they can construct a space where freedom, creativity, and play can exist. To others, they represent a dangerous space of nihilism, anarchy, and “wild analysis.”
Darlene B. Ehrenberg's book, The Intimate Edge has been written in a time and culture where even the most sacred of psychoanalytic principles, such as neutrality and self-disclosure, as well as the meaning of what actually defines psychoanalysis,