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The central thesis of this book is that psychoanalysis, as an idea, is socially constructed but then becomes interwoven into the taken-for-granted meanings of everyday life, especially our notion of the self. The approach will be unfamiliar to some in that it presents a sociological perspective; Parker is concerned not specifically with clinical practice but rather with psychoanalysis as a theory in the world and of the world.
Using discourse analysis, Parker goes playfully back and forth between how culture gets into psychoanalysis and how analysis permeates the culture. Psychoanalysis can explain ideology but is itself an ideology. Freud's theories are rooted in the Enlightenment and the economic and cultural features of the nineteenth century and yet they have influenced the development of their antithesis in postmodern. fragmentation. Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to discourse, Parker teases out the interweaving of psychoanalysis and culture to capture the Freudian nature of subjectivity. He reminds us that this reflexive capacity is relatively recent, bringing to mind Foucault's observation that perhaps all but a minority of people could have reached the depressive position in medieval society.
Locating psychoanalysis as part of the modernist project, he is sceptical about its role as the master key to open up culture, a metanarrative with which to finally explain the world. Contrasted with this absolutist view is the postmodernist stance of Lyotard, Lacan and Zizek in which the omniscience of psychoanalysis, socialism and other grand narratives has given way to so many little stories with perpetual speculation on the impossibility of truth. Intensity of experience rather than meaning becomes the object of desire and the Real (the lack) takes over from reality. As Terry Eagleton puts it, ‘The Real is the Primordial wound we incurred by our fall from the pre-oedipal