You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Post-Cartesian thinking in psychoanalysis is both profoundly important and devilishly difficult. Roger Kennedy's new book illustrates both.
Kennedy has, first of all, in order to address the problem of human subjectivity, taken the daunting task of interdisciplinary study quite seriously. At least three quarters of this book consists of summaries and quotations from philosophers (e.g., Dennett, Rorty, Cavell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin), sociologists (Parsons, Durkheim, Schutz), linguists (Lévi-Strauss), and psychoanalysts (especially Lacan, Klein, Bollas, and, yes, Freud) whose work has contributed to contemporary rethinking in psychoanalysis and whom Kennedy has obviously studied carefully. These valuable presentations of work from various disciplines convey a sense of the importance of the task and at the same time direct the reader's further reading.
Second, Kennedy has drawn from this literature a central theme: the “elusiveness” of the human subject, by which he means that a center can never be found, or at least that human centers are multiple. He suggests, instead, that we speak of “subjective organization,” a term that captures personal embeddedness in social contexts, an essential aspect of humanness for Kennedy and one often underemphasized in psychoanalytic writing about dyads. This contextualism (see Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997) is a second feature of this book that is worth the price and the reading time all by itself and is probably, in Kennedy's book, the clearest indicator of post-Cartesian psychoanalytic thinking.
I also particularly appreciate Kennedy's sensitivity to the tendencies toward relativism in some postmodernists (e.g., Lyotard) and his attention to the problem of the one and the many: