To the Editor:

Recently, in these pages, Lois Shawver (1996) asked, “What can postmodernism do for psychoanalysis?” But she could have just as easily asked, “What has postmodernism been doing to the practice of psychoanalysis?” For is she not saying that modern psychoanalytic texts, rooted in the implicit understanding that our words are true because they correspond with an independent reality, or because they have a measure of narrative coherence, now require an explicit defense? And, of course, once defended, remain problematic. That is to say, the modernistic conceit of implicit authority, expressed as, e.g., “It's science (or clinical authority) so it is true,” has, in the face of the postmodern critique, been reworded. One may read now: “The authority of our words makes it true.” And what sort of authority is that? Shawver gets us to wonder.

For some, none. The linguistic turn can appear to be a nihilistic turning away from any professional claim to objectivity. From this point of view, the practice of having words take on their meaning in the context of use is an invitation to an Alice-in-Wonderland madness in which everything is simply said for effect. Rhetoric rules. But whose? Well, we are now witnessing the rhetoric of the insurance companies dominating professional practice.

Others, now that professional objectivity is eclipsed, find purpose in moral, ethical, or political rhetoric. One hears, “If you are not a feminist, you are a sexist!” as if this were an unassailable truth. And what is odd here is that while the rhetoric defending this political move is often postmodern sounding, the politics is early 20th-century rationalism. Shawver helps us see that these understandings, “whatever works” nihilism, bureaucratic control in the name of consumerism, or doctrinaire political idealism, misconstrue the linguistic turn as a merely turning to words without any sense of world.

If anything, postmodernism invites us to question what has been called the blueprint approach to hum