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When I was in college, a popular professor of postmodernism wrote widely about the death of the father. With a dazzling command of Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard, along with their modern predecessors including Freud, he showed how various authorities were made and maintained rather than given. He exposed the many ways in which realities are constructed and can therefore be deconstructed. And yet, as he vigorously discussed the death of the father, he did so in what I thought was a paternalistic way. Though his words asserted that the father was dead, his charismatically authoritative stance suggested that a new father had come to campus and was as vital as ever. His approach represented for me both the potency and the seductiveness of some postmodern writing.
Upon reading that S. Montana Katz's edited volume, Metaphor and Fields, was an attempt to address “an era in which psychoanalysis is coming to terms with the conclusions and implications of postmodernism” (p. 4), I worried that it would be full of postmodern pyrotechnics and be more clever than sound. I was wrong. Katz has convened an assembly of rigorous, thoughtful writers who are wrestling with fundamental questions about psychoanalysis as a discipline and psychic experience as our area of study. She ambitiously attempts to find what is irreducible in order to facilitate communication between and beyond analysts, even when such interaction merely clarifies differences.
The book's first section builds on the ideas presented by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980). In their painstaking study, Lakoff and Johnson identify and analyze the most common metaphors associated with hundreds of concepts. For example, they link the following phrases to the concept consciousness: “Get up. Wake up. I'm up already. He rises early in the morning. He fell asleep. He dropped off to