Fractured Fairy Tales: Commentary on Paper by Susan Fairfield

In responding to Dr. Fairfield's paper, I offer a somewhat personal statement about my own intellectual evolution and changes in the cultural landscape during the past few decades. I argue that postmodernism subsumes such dissimilar phenomena that it is virtually impossible to take a stand either for or against it. Accepting Fairfield's contention that analysts adhering to an allegedly postmodern view of subjectivity often surreptitiously reintroduce modernist elements in their thinking, I express serious doubt whether there is any discipline that could accurately claim to be “consistently postmodern.” I see Fairfield's argument that “any description we give of subjectivity is no more and no less a story than any other” as only half right. Conceptualizing selfhood or subjectivity “not as an entity but as another language for the way a person inclusively symbolizes experience,” I argue that, although cultures and individuals may vary enormously in the “story” they tell as to the content of their inclusive symbols of experience, the process of forming an inclusive symbol is of a different order, where the word story seems hardly to apply. I use a clinical example to highlight how, from an analytic point of view, the core affective processes that allow someone to come together to feel something meaningful are more important than the way in which subjectivity is conceptualized. I conclude by noting how even those analysts who feel comfortable riding the current postmodern wave seem to struggle to withstand its dangerous

undertow. I suggest that analysts remain pluralists about postmodernism—believing in postmodern fashion that there is a variety of narratives to be told of postmodernism too, some more congenial to analytic work than others.