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The emerging psychoanalytic avant garde, vouchsafes the philosopherpsychologist Carlo Strenger in the final lines of this book, is characterized by the celebration of individuality rather than the pathologization of differences. Renouncing any claim to knowledge as illegitimate and unrrealistic, he pursues a radical narrativization taking constructivism one step further. Arguing that the tasks of individuality have changed greatly since the beginning of the twentieth century and that heterosexuality has gradually lost its claims, what was once transgressive is now a cultural alternative in lifestyle, while social norms are no longer accepted as necessary or “natural.” His overall goal, he avows (p. 32), is to radicalize the constructivist approach along Nietzschean and Foucauldian lines.
Holding to an all-out epistemic nihilism, he maintains that “it has been one of the persistent illusions of our profession that we can arrive at definitive formulations of the deep structures of the mind on the basis of clinical observation” (p. 193). At most, he says, we can formulate narratives. He concedes that his descriptions do not much differentiate between psychoanalytic and other approaches (p. 60). In his view, psychoanalytic theory making has been mythological without knowing it, and “what happens to myth when it becomes conscious of its own nature is that it becomes literature” (p. 63). Not fitting his idea of science, modeled on the “hard sciences”—scientific theories are to him formalized (p. 73) and algorithmic (p. 134), while psychoanalytic ones are metaphoric or mythical creations—psychoanalysis should be understood as a literary enterprise under the postmodern paradigm of art, which from romanticism on has been governed by the ideal of new creation, rather than that of science (p. 51).
Strenger believes that the narrative turn was a first, crucial step toward the playful, pluralistic universe of current psychoanalysis, but