This paper explores the ways in which psychoanalytic conceptions of self and personal change suffuse culture and so frame the activities of psychotherapists. It is argued that the modern culture which gave issue to psychoanalysis has mutated in recent years into what some writers have termed ‘postmodernity’, and that psychoanalytic notions have also changed. The conceptual device of the ‘discursive complex’ is used to trace how themes of ‘intellectualization’, ‘transference’ and ‘trauma’ which organize modern therapeutic discourse have been augmented, through the development of new forms of communication technology, by postmodern themes of ‘the Symbolic’, ‘Che Vuoi’ and ‘enigmatic signifiers’.