Letters

To the Editor:

“[N]othing is simple unless one is willing to settle for illusory simplifications…” (Barratt, 1993, p. 216).

In his review of Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse: Knowing and Being since Freud's Psychology, Louis Berger (Psychoanalytic Books, 5, 185-192) faulted Barnaby Barratt on two counts: that the writing is difficult and unclear, and that Barratt says nothing in the new book he had not said already. I believe this book is very important, and I would like to offer a more appreciative reading.

Although quite a few philosophers have devoted attention to psychoanalysis, their writing seems to have minimal influence on practitioners of the art, who often prefer to work at refining practice by formulating relationships among diverse observations, gathered in a clinical setting, into a “theory” drawn from the work itself. A commitment to examine their work from the foreign perspective of “philosophy” has little appeal for many analysts, who seem to regard Freud's professed disinterest in philosophy as something of a family tradition. Practitioners of this sort may not relish Barratt's book, but they are his intended audience.

Barratt is a psychoanalyst himself, dedicated to practice as much as to theory. No other writer on the current scene explores crucial ethical and epistemological problems questions in such a systematic manner as he. No other writer presents these matters in such lucid, elegant, and compelling terms as Barratt. Readers of the second chapter of this book, “Free Associative Method and the Dimensions of Meaningfulness,” will see his remarkably deft way of presenting clinical data and unpacking essential meanings demonstrated.

Barratt believes that psychoanalysts are on the leading edge of a cultural movement, postmodernism, that will eventually lead us to abandon assumptions that have governed twenty-five hundred