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This is a most valuable, thought-provoking, and highly readable volume. Jane Flax, “Renaissance Woman” par excellence, is a philosopher, a feminist, and a psychotherapist. She is a grand synthesizer of “thinking fragments,” as she examines the bits and pieces of three strands of contemporary thought, which she regards as transitional in our transitional society: psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism. She shows us the links between them, the conversations they can have with one another, and the barriers to communication between them. Flax takes the reader on an intellectual roller-coaster ride that is exciting and exhilarating for most of the journey and then, only in the last chapters, slows down to an obsessional drag. This book is for the iconoclast; “Deconstructionism,” the language of the 90s, is spoken here. The Freudian scholar will find Freud interpreted through a lens somewhat different from the one he or she is accustomed to, and different questions are asked of Freud's theoretical assumptions.
For those who have not kept up with modern thought, the news is that Voltaire is dead, the Enlightenment has failed, and 18th-century values—individualism, reason, freedom, and ethics—are no