Frie's Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism suggests that while modernism emphasized the idea that truth and knowledge can be gained through objective, rational science, postmodernism subsumes many truths, and in particular celebrates incoherence, contradictions and fragmentation. Postmodernism, as it has filtered down to the helping professions, emphasizes that we are shaped by our social and linguistic patterns and that meaning is not fixed. Postmodernists highlight multiplicity of experience and challenge the idea of a unitary self. The clinical work of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis has subtly changed to a more reciprocal, intersubjective venture, with a relaxation