Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse: Knowing and Being since Freud's Psychology by Barnaby Barratt: (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, xvi + 274 pp.)

Psychoanalysis, the richest and most influential of 20th-century psychologies, is also the one most fraught with fundamental ambiguities. Chief among these are the conflicting implications that the discovery, or (depending on one's point of view) the invention, of the unconscious holds for the possibility and value of human self-knowledge and self-mastery. Freud was fond of describing his psychoanalytic discoveries as a kind of latter-day Copernican revolution, which he saw as constituting a third great blow to human narcissism. Already displaced by Copernicus from a central position in the cosmos, already reminded by Darwin of his bestial origins, the human being was now being asked to acknowledge that even his consciousness, even reason itself, could not be master in its own house but instead was the plaything of forces grounded in instinct and the body, forces of which reason was almost wholly unaware.

The discovery of the unconscious can also be experienced rather differently, however, as is apparent from momentary reflection on Freud's comparison of the psychoanalytic with the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. The comparison is obviously flattering to Freud's own personal narcissism, implying as it does that he is the equal of these heroes of Western thought; but beyond this it flatters the