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The purpose of this presentation is to reconsider the psychoanalytic relationship in the light of newer trends in our culture that may be fundamental to how we conceptualize. These newer trends rally haphazardly under the banner of what is called postmodernism or, referring to that portion of postmodern theorizing pertinent to our concerns, poststructuralism. First, we will circle in the recondite skies of philosophy before swooping upon psychoanalysis and what I will call the signature of the psychoanalytic relationship, considering how this latter manifests in the language of psychoanalytic interpretation. Finally, we will find application through a specific clinical example.
I come to a consideration of this matter from a longstanding interest in the culturalist orientation of Karen Horney (1987), from what I regard as an intimacy unique to the analytic relationship (Ingram, 1991, ), and from an ongoing curiousity and interest in personality structure and how that structure is manifest in microanalytic scrutiny of the analytic session (Ingram, 1983, 1989).
The notion of personality or character structure is axiomatic to psychoanalytic discourse. All our major theories of psychoanalysis hew to such a notion with the notable exceptions of contemporary interpersonalist positions, perhaps as articulated by Edgar Levenson (1983) and Stephen Mitchell (1988), the intersubjective approaches of Atwood and Stolorow (1984), and some family systems theorists (Goolishian and Anderson, 1991). Increasingly, the direction of concern in psychoanalysis is away from structure and more toward how we relate and how we and our patients interpret what is said. This is a postmodern, poststructuralist trend. It is a hermeneutic, dialogic, word-oriented approach that examines and in some hands seeks to rectify what is referred to as the