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Analytical psychology purports to help despairing people repair the tattered meaning of their existence. Many analytical psychologists feel that postmodernist approaches to understanding are relativistic and nihilistic and, therefore, destroy meaning. They wonder how such points of view can be compatible with the practice of analysis.
Ronald Schenk, a senior training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and in private practice in Dallas, Texas, has written a book which disputes these negative views. Postmodernism has been difficult to define, as it has evolved from work in a variety of fields. These include literary criticism, history, sociology, semiotics (the study of symbolic systems, including language), epistemology (the study of the methods of acquiring knowledge, and how its truth claims are justified), rhetoric (the study of the use of language for persuasion), and the fine arts. Each of these disciplines has framed the definition in terms of its own subject matter. However, it is the ontolog-ical (theories on the nature of being) insights of postmodernism that distinguish it from the modernist views it claims to supersede.
Schenk explains this distinction clearly, showing how the first modernist thinkers asserted that humans had a fundamental or essential nature based on their being subjects with the capacity for rational thought. This approach to human nature is called essentialism, or foundationalism, and the process of arriving at the essential nature is called reductionism. In contrast to modernist theories, postmodernism stresses the impossibility of locating any foundational explanation of human nature or being (Rosenau 1992). Schenk describes the textual analytic method of deconstruction of Derrida, who claims that no final explanation of things in rational terms is ever possible (Derrida 1967). However, far from this being a descent into nihilism and relativism, it is, rather, an opening up of possibilities for new meanings.