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Last year, as we hit Harehills in search of curry, I rashly confessed my intention to review this book to an old, literary friend. His eyes twinkled in the drizzle as he replied, ‘You must be a sadomasochist’, and, to be fair, it seemed ‘cathexis’ of his target that evening was more imminent than mine! However, the ambivalence of his joke lingered as I read. I wondered whether my curiosity would stay the distance or whether my imagined endeavour would prove worthy of mockery. With hindsight, speculations as to whether I could come to terms with myself seem apt and congruent with this collection of quite thrilling essays in which several psychoanalysts attempt a similar thing. Their work depicts psychoanalysis circling around multiplicity, pluralism and ambivalence, somehow rediscovering itself through a refractive postmodern lens. Indeed it is one of the book's ironies that, to become reacquainted with Freud's dialectical vision, one has to journey with them, away from rather than via psychoanalytic convention. In contrast to the one-dimensional refutations which have failed to seriously confront the challenges of postmodernism, these writers can be seen to push their ideological and moral beliefs to the limit in sustained attempts to recast psychoanalysis in a contemporary light and, at points, to think the unthinkable. To this end, the thought of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, Leowald, Heidigger and Foucault, in particular, is accessibly rehearsed and reconstructed into language which nonetheless meets the challenges of complexity.
In Chapter 1, Elliott and Spezzano cast psychoanalysis and postmodernism in symbiotic play, developing an analysis of how one encounters the other in diverse contexts. Following an exploration of conflicting notions of modernism and postmodernism, they suggest that there are ‘three faces of postmodernism’: the aesthetic, the social-theoretic and philosophical, and the private and intersubjective. Aided by this more differentiated