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.
Writing is one of the biggest means of legitimization—a field’s literature serves to assert its authority and substantiate its validity. Given that contemporary psychoanalysts can no longer draw on the epistemological certainty of the past in the work we do in the room with our patients or what we make of it in the literature, psychoanalytic writing can be daunting as well as kind of weird. This paper traces that weirdness to two sources: (1) the weirdness of psychoanalysis itself, and (2) the cross-disciplinary shift from twentieth-century modernism to postmodernism, which manifested most prominently within psychoanalysis in the form of the relational movement.