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Postmodernism is an umbrella term for a constellation of unorthodox positions. A common and central feature is their rejection of the “modernist,” Cartesian world view, the episteme pejoratively labeled by its critics metaphysical scientism or the Plato-Kant canon (Rorty), the onto-theological tradition (Heidegger), phallo-logocentrism or the metaphysics of presence (Derrida), or the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition (Bernstein).
Barnaby Barratt, a psychoanalyst in full-time private practice, has been writing for some time (1984, 1985, 1988a, 1988b, 1990) about the relationships between psychoanalysis and various aspects of postmodernist thinking. In these works, one can identify four everpresent, dominant themes: (1) a radical critique of “major approaches to epistemology—subjectivistic, objectivistic, intersubjectivistic, and hermeneutic” (p. xv); (2) an unorthodox ontology comprising two dimensions—the traditional realm of semiosis, and an ineffable dimension of “desire” (a term he uses idiosyncratically—see p. 122); (3) “a reconsideration of psychoanalysis as the method or process of free-associative discourse and…[demonstrating] the vital importance of this method in terms of contemporary transitions of thinking” (p. xi); and (4) the strict distinction “between psychoanalytic process as the revolutionary science of discourse and systematized ‘psychoanalysis’ as a normalized and normalizing doctrine” (p. xii). (Barratt uses quotation marks to formalize this distinction.) His radical ontology explicates his radical psychoanalysis, and vice versa.
His ontology is critical of the modernist Cartesian episteme which privileges semiosis—a system of signs, significations symbols, or representations which serves and preserves “identitarian”