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This collection of essays edited by Roger Frie and Donna Orange offers a critique of and alternative approaches to the central arguments of postmodern psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians. The authors are all critics of radical postmodernism, although their arguments vary to the extent that they either want to moderate or refute postmodern tenets. Overall, the authors feel that postmodernism has made useful contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis, but that some more moderate approach should be taken. However, given that no postmodern analyst agreed to contribute to the volume, it is a one-sided argument. This is a limitation of the book, but once this is acknowledged it does not appear to be a problem. Space will not permit a discussion of every chapter in this volume; given this, I will focus on several of the chapters that I think are not only the most interesting, but which also reflect the overall attitude of the editors.
In the introduction Roger Frie lays out some of the most common claims of postmodern thinkers. A broad and complex group of philosophies, postmodernism questions such assumptions as objectivity, truth, and the importance of reason. The world is ungrounded, fragmented, diverse, and contingent rather than fixed and reliable. Postmodernists question basic modern ideas such as individual freedom and self-determination as well as the modernist belief in essential laws and universal principles. Postmodern psychoanalysis is associated as much with the philosophical rejection of such notions as autonomy, objectivity, and an ultimate truth, as it is with the clinical implications of fluid and shifting centers of meaning and identity. The once unitary Self is viewed as ambiguous and multiple and the therapeutic process is mutually constructed out of the interacting subjectivities of the patient and analyst.
Frie points out how postmodern analysts (by whom he means Lewis Aron, Philip Bromberg, Irwin Hoffman, and the early work of Stephen Mitchell, a