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I found this a challenging, difficult and rewarding book. Let me come clean. My background and outlook, which I suspect are shared by many psychotherapists, are imbued with modern, as opposed to postmodern, values. My undergraduate learning reified the Enlightenment values of rational thinking and of a belief in hard headed
empiricism. I cut my analytic teeth on Locke, Berkeley and Hume. My training as a social worker and, later, as a psychotherapist, profoundly altered this belief in an objective world ‘out there’. A career commitment to work with troubled couples has left me in no doubt about how both partners' different perspectives and realities - their plural psyches - shape and reflect the nature of their presenting problems. In recognizing multiple realities and the importance of inter-subjectivity I am being post-modern. However, I retain my modernist roots through identification with the traditions of the Independents within British Object Relations Theory and a belief that evidence-based practice is a ‘good thing’.
Reading this book served to shake my modernist convictions. In the process of pursuing a debate in my mind with the author I learned much that was new. For example, one problem for the clinician reading postmodern theory is in understanding an unfamiliar discourse which crosses many disciplines - fine art, architecture, sociology, philosophy to name a few. Hauke does a great service to the reader who is either new to the field or has struggled to understand arcane texts by summarizing some major thinkers in relatively clear and succinct terms. He also helped me understand Jung in a more profound way than was possible before. I thought the whole book was excellent in conveying Jung's idea of the self as being something larger than the ego and as being comprised of a collective as well as a personal unconscious. Jung's idea that the self involves a fluid interplay of conscious and unconscious elements and that the ego may not represent the suprem