Reply to Louis A. Sass

It is a privilege to have one's work well read, a pleasure to have it well regarded, and a rare honor to have it thoughtfully criticized. I do know how fortunate I am that my Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse has engaged the appreciative but not uncritical attention of a scholar of Professor Sass's capabilities. In a few pages he has deftly summarized for the reader of Psychoanalytic Dialogues many of the coordinates of my recent thinking about psychoanalytic discourse, and I trust it will not seem merely quarrelsome if this rejoinder now focuses on the significance of those coordinates he omits and why, from my point of view, the flaws in his hermeneutic stance are illuminated by these omissions. Sass's review is, I believe, successful in indicating the ways in which he and I part company, and for that I thank him. I believe his review is less successful in its grasp of why we part company and the implications of this divergence.

If this brief exchange between Sass and me were to be extended, it might usefully explore, in the context of the problematics of psychoanalytic inquiry, some of the profoundest dilemmas in which the western intellectual tradition is currently immersed. Although Sass's review does not address this aspect of my book directly, I believe I could convince him of one of the major theses therein, namely, that a revolution in thinking has been set in motion by the transitions of this century, that it is a revolution that we can scarcely comprehend because we are in its midst, and that the history of psychoanalysis has operated both as an instigator of this revolution and as a reaction against it.

Philosophically, this “revolution” has been labeled “the end of metaphysics,” but perhaps it is most easily appreciated as the loss of a transcendental or foundational point of universal reference by which the diversities of thinking and communication, the plurivocality of human experiences and values, might be commonly anchored or organized as