What Postmodernism can do for Psychoanalysis: A Guide to the Postmodern Vision

Postmodernism has much to offer psychoanalysis, but first we must rescue it from the dusty shelves of philosophy without letting it slip into the trivialized slogans of controversy.

We will get around the problem of dusty obscurity by giving experiential portrayals of postmodern concepts and, whenever possible, thought experiments to bring these ideas to life. It will further clarify these concepts when we notice that many have been foreshadowed in familiar psychoanalytic writings. It can even be argued that what was so revolutionary in Freud's thinking was the postmodern element in his theories (cf. Barratt, 1993). Postmodernism examines the way language functions not only to inform but to distort. Psychoanalysis does this, too. Freud's discussion of jokes, his analysis of negation, his account of the way symptoms and dreams are often the instantiation of metaphor—these are all examples of the many postmodern elements in his work. Moreover, there are passages in Karen Horney's work, as we will see, that provide us with postmodern insights. These more familiar postmodern concepts will be a good place to set anchor for a more expanded description of postmodernism.

To avoid the trivializing effects of slogans we will simply sail past all the interesting political questions posed by postmodernism—questions about feminism, queer theory, multiculturalism. The postmodern challenge to dominant culture and its advocacy for the oppressed can turn postmodern's profundities into flat and unconvincing statements that leave people talking past each other. If we are to harvest any clinical wisdom here, political issues will have to wait while we focus our sights on what is clinically more relevant.

We cannot, however, simply sail past the tangle of ideas in the writing of the critics of postmodern psychoanalysis. These critics have woven a tight web of redefined concepts that would lure us into a house of mirrors where