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This issue of the leading German psychoanalytic journal Psyche deals in a very impressive and thorough philosophical way with current controversies around the topics of subject, identity, and history; each of the studies published here counters some prominent current trends toward negating the psychoanalytic relevance of these three. (All passages quoted in this review have been translated by me.)
Werner Bohleber (who contributed the paper “Psychoanalysis, Adolescence, and the Problem of Identity”), the editor of Psyche, refutes a fashionable trend (represented by, among others, Bollas, Hinshelwood, Schafer, and Laplanche) that wants to move psychoanalysis to a “postmodern criticism of the subject” by advocating the “dissolution of identity and the death of the subject” or declaring “the category of multiple personality disorder as a criterion of the current epoch” (p. 517). “The decentering and deconstructive potency of the analytic method represents to them [Strenger and Laplanche] a congenial approach for understanding the modern self; it recognizes its unity as an illusion and understands itself as decentered, as being constantly in flux and open for revisions” (p. 509). For Schafer, “the self is a narrative and requires a listener in order to exist.” For Hinshelwood it is “an interpersonal negotiation about what is being ascribed to self and others by splitting and projective identification” (p. 512). For Bollas, “the idea of a unitary self is an illusion … a kind of false consciousness expressing the wish of the individual for unification and integration.” (Similar ideas could, by the way, be adduced from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky).
Bohleber rightly counters that in this perspective the function of affects vanishes: “They cannot just be reduced to narrative experience but are founded in body processes. Moreover, the role of traumatic