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“What is postmodernism and how might it apply to psychoanalysis?” We have frequently encountered this question among thoughtful analysts and candidates-in-training. From two different perspectives, the first papers of this Journal issue undertake responses.

First, Lois Shawver takes up the matter. She succeeds in cutting through the jargon of postmodern discourse that for many readers has rendered this genre obtuse, intimidating, and even ridiculous. Shawver argues that what is most innovative in the writing of Freud and many neo-Freudians, including Karen Horney, is precisely its postmodern element. Shawver contends that like Moliere's M. Jourdain, who discovered he had been speaking prose all along, psychoanalysts may find that they have been following tenets of postmodernism. Of course, the language of postmodernism is strange to some ears. The author explains basic terms such as deconstruction, differance (with an a), and the metaphysics of presence. She responds to critics of the postmodern turn in psychoanalysis. She argues that postmodern theory—with its emphasis on how words implicitly impel the construction of meanings of which we are unaware—can secure for psychoanalysis a better epistemological grounding for its scholarship than that provided by traditional Enlightenment principles.

Approaching how postmodernism figures in psychoanalysis from a different vantage is the exploration of studies by Juan Rodado and Mario Rendon on artificial intelligence (Al). It wasn't so long ago that Al was conceived as a kind of rapid-sequencing logic machine, a great algorithm, a single central processing unit, vast and profound, that would be able to “think.” Realizing that intelligence is not the same as playing chess or solving equations, students of Al have increasingly relied on a different model—one in which many copies of one comparatively simple program might interact simultaneously without any central authority to render them cohesive, unified, and efficient. The p