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This collection of papers by editors Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano and contributors Jane Flax, Stephen Frosh, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Bracher, Stephen Mitchell, Thomas Ogden, and Karen Peoples sets out
to “think the unthinkable,” to test the limits of psychoanalysis in the face of postmodern challenges that call for a rediscovery of psychoanalysis itself. At the same time, however, Elliott and Spezzano seem concerned to assuage the widespread fear that postmodernism drastically undermines the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The result of this cautious endeavor is, for the most part, not only the thinkable but the already discovered.
Through their own contributions and the majority of the papers they have selected, the editors argue in favor of a psyche decentered from conscious rationality by fantasy, affect, imagination, and transformative liminal states. Bracher offers an updated account of the Lacanian divided subject, but in this anthology continuity with the past is emphasized, and extensive references to Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Loewald convey the reassuring idea that analogues of some postmodern concepts have found a place within psychoanalysis from the beginning. And so they have, if one is willing both to overlook countervailing evidence in the works of those cited and to favor a definition of postmodernism that downplays the Enlightenment component in modernism in favor of what amounts to a version of Romanticism. While it is true that such an emphasis can be liberating and healing for self-experience constrained by Enlightenment modernism, it is hardly the threat to psychoanalytic theory and practice heralded by more radical postmodern trends.
Indeed, with the exception of Flax's Foucauldian cautions and Benjamin's exploration of what is involved in the recognition of the internal and external other, this collection represents what one of the editors himself calls postmodernism “lite.” Largely or totally missing from these studies are the