This collection of twenty-one relatively brief essays offers a radical postmodern and interdisciplinary critique of what are alleged to be the mindsets, clinical practices, and institutional lives of an increasing number of psychoanalysts. In a postmodern world seen increasingly as multiple and fragmented, the systems of knowledge humans create constitute the only source of meaning. There are no absolutes and no universals; no level of understanding or discourse is more basic than others. Since there is no agreed-upon methodology for determining the validity of our theoretical propositions, there is no consensus strategy for deciding who possesses knowledge.

Thus Haya Oakley, in her contribution to this collection (“What is a Psychoanalyst?”), underscores the great diversity in our notions of the unconscious, of its nature, structure, and possible dynamics. She notes that “We all claim to work with ‘repression’ and ‘resistance,’ yet have different ways of identifying what they mean and what one ‘does’ with their clinical expressions. We all claim that there is no