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This paper examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and postmodernity, especially the intricate connections between the psychic subject and contemporary cultural forms. Postmodern assumptions that take as given the fragmentation of subjectivity are critically addressed. Against the psychoanalytically influenced poststructuralist critique of the “death of the subject,” I propose a dialectical interplay of deintegration and restructuration of self-constitution and intersubjective relations in the postmodern age. Recent psychoanalytic dialogues are discussed in order to rethink postmodern discourses of shifting and fluid identities. In particular, it is suggested that the development of the concept of thinking
Dr. Elliott is Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Program in Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Melbourne.
Acknowledgments. I should like to thank Nicola Geraghty and Albert J. Paolini for long discussions about this paper. My thanks to Jeff Prager, Charles Spezzano, and Stephen Frosh for comments and suggestions about the relationship between contemporary psychoanalysis and postmodernity. I am also grateful to Arlene Kramer Richards and Thomas Ogden for their comments and advice on the case-materials discussed in this paper.
proposed by Wilfred Bion contains the beginnings of an exploration of a realm of unconscious experience which is restructured in postmodernity. Extending Bion, the idea of reflexive thinking and scanning is proposed as a way of conceptualizing autonomous psychological organization in conditions of postmodernity. However, anxiety in this mode is also central to postmodern self-experience, and consists of defenses of protective identification and antithought. Accordingly, both reflexive thinking and denial, as ways of organizing experience, are discussed and clinically illustrated.