Of Existence and Experience: A Review of Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism, Edited by Roger Frie. New York:  Routledge, 2004.  234 pp.

Recent “postmodern” developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice have swept into analytic view yet another look (and study of) fundamental questions of agency, freedom (of will), personal responsibility, authenticity, and the nature of truth and analytic authority. This epistemological upheaval forms the central concern of Roger Frie's interesting new book of edited essays on human experience and psychoanalytic theory.

The so-called postmodern turn in psychoanalysis, as in such diverse fields as architecture, critical theory, contemporary art, and philosophy, has led to the questioning of our fundamental beliefs. For analysts that, of course, means our concern with the nature of that human encounter we call the psychoanalytic process. Frie's book serves as an excellent guide through the philosophic, intellectual, and clinical thickets of post-modern thought and belief. The illustrious contributors to this volume, individually and jointly, help us achieve a more sophisticated and complex understanding of the dynamisms that make up the analytic process. This book is more than just another entry in the debate between the “old” positivism of modernists and the “new” relativism of postmodernists.