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Psychoanalysis, particularly in the United States, has tried to make itself acceptable. In doing so, argues the French analyst Laurence Kahn, it has diminished what we might call Freud's “shocking emphasis” on the economy of the drives and in particular on sexuality. And instead of accepting Freud's “cold,” interpretive attitude, postmodern psychoanalysts have replaced it with empathy for the patient. To accommodate itself to postmodernism, psychoanalysis went a step further and in many quarters accepted the idea that there are no impartial psychoanalytic observations or valid interpretations. Instead of aspiring to such knowledge, postmodern analysts opted to view their work as providing hermeneutic understanding. In The Apathetic Psychoanalyst and the Postmodern Patient, Kahn offers as proof of her thesis the fact that in American psychoanalysis the power of language to unearth secrets, or of silence to break through superficialities, gives way to three other ideas: the idea of integration, the idea of the internal world (which replaces the notion of the unconscious), and the idea of the “self” (a word that has become omnipresent).
The book ends with a series of informative one-page descriptions of about fifty psychoanalysts and philosophers, from both sides of the Atlantic, who have influenced postmodern psychoanalysis.
Early on the author quotes Peter Fonagy, who rejects the idea that the transference is the mobilization of repressed infantile forces. Instead Fonagy sees the transference as making visible the attitude of “I-with-another,” which then in analysis can be addressed and corrected in the “here-and-now.” Hence, psychoanalysis is work that assumes a two-person psychology.
This leads naturally to stressing in the analyst the need for empathy, an emphasis Paul Ricoeur has remarked in his writings on psychoanalysis. Instead of offering Freudian interpretation, postmodern analysts feel they have to help, support, and respond to their patients.