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In the existential-phenomenological tradition, understanding oneself is not a matter of reflecting on one's encounter with the world, but of experiencing that encounter in all its fullness. To discover that we are human entails finding that inevitable “surfeit of meaning that cannot be reduced to the context or constructs we use to explain individual experience” (Frie, p. 18). An embodied experience of self lies at the core of all understanding. Roger Frie writes: “we determine our worlds just as our worlds determine who we are” (p. 18). In Understanding Experience he has assembled a very scholarly collection of papers to show how this premise is born out in different theorists' and clinicians' work.
Frie and his colleagues situate their writing in a critique of postmodernism. They believe that postmodernists' preoccupation with language, context, and the social construction of intersubjectivity proffers a dangerous turn away from the self who experiences back to the subject who thinks. Determined entirely by his context, the postmodern subject only understands himself by deconstructing his situation, that is, by thinking about it. Since postmodern theory emphasizes that our thoughts are largely structured by discursive regimens and relational configurations, even the most thoughtful person takes second place to context. The practical implication of this for clinical work is that explanation trumps experience. Postmodernist clinicians end up tracing multiplicity while having no way to engage real selves.
It will be immediately clear that I do not agree. In this review, I argue that the critique of postmodernism presented here is weak and that, consequently, it undermines what is special about Frie's book, which invites