Barbara Held, a psychologist who teaches at Bowdoin, offers strong, but truncated, criticism of postmodernist influences in psychotherapy. In defining her critical object, she selects three core tenets: (a) Because experience is mediated by language, postmodernists deny the possibility of direct knowledge of the external world and reject a realist epistemology. Only an antirealist epistemology is compatible with the linguistic mediation of experience; (b) The categories of linguistic mediation take the form of a story, or “narrative,” about the world. There is no single authoritative narrative, and consequently there is no general truth but, rather, personal, unique, contextualized truths. Scientific progress is an illusion; (c) Postmodernists question whether an individual should be assumed to possess an identity, a single form or personality, as opposed to a more fluid, “decentered” subjectivity.