Psychoanalysis at its Limits

Navigating the Postmodern Turn

Anthony Elliott, Charles Spezzano

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138353770
• eBook ISBN: 9780429757358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Has psychoanalysis become postmodern? How are the various schools of psychoanalysis being altered by postmodernism? What role does psychoanalysis have to play in the cultural debate in postmodern times? Originally published in 2000, Psychoanalysis at its Limits offers a stimulating account of the complex and contradictory nature of psychoanalysis in the postmodern age. It presents a history and critique of the concept of postmodernism throughout contemporary psychoanalytic thought. As such it is a critical survey of the complex relations between desire, selfhood and culture.

1 Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn

Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano

In a 1929 essay, T.S. Eliot wrote about Dante that 'he not only thought in a way in which every man of his culture in the whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which was common and commonly understood throughout Europe' (cited in Trachtenberg, 1979: 1). Dante may have been the last writer to enjoy this guaranteed rapport with his audience. Certainly no psychoanalytic author can expect anything like it. Quite the contrary, it is guaranteed that all psychoanalysts writing for their 'colleagues' today will encounter, among at least some readers, disbelief at their failure to grasp basic principles, headshaking over their hubris in imagining that what they have written contains new ideas, or disinterest from readers not of their 'school' because they talk 'another language' that is too 'old fashioned' or 'not really psychoanalysis'.

Further, in the theorizing and clinical reports contained in contemporary analytic journals one does not only find authors whose work is intended to advance (or fits neatly into) a project called ego analysis, self psychology, object relational theory, or Kleinian analysis. One also finds authors whose work seems harder to pigeonhole; but, as philosopher Iris Murdoch (1993: 1-2) has suggested: 'We fear plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos, we want to transform what we cannot dominate or understand into something reassuring and familiar, into ordinary being, into history, art, religion, science.' We want to say: 'That is classical analysis, self psychology, relational psychoanalysis. The author is an element of one of our reassuring unities.'

As the individual voices in psychoanalysis proliferate, we need more unifying labels to maintain order and ward off chaos. 'Postmodernism' is the most recent. As with other labels, it relies for its appearance of usefulness and validity on the availability of a contrary perspective: 'modernism'. In this case, for the first time in the history of psychoanalysis, the duelling labels have been imported from other disciplines. This has tended to increase the confusion about their usage beyond the level that has beset the use of other psychoanalytic dichotomies. The aim of our chapter is not so ambitious as to clear up this confusion, but rather simply to describe it. We will argue, in fact, that it might be a good idea to allow it to remain confusing.

Modernism and Postmodernism: The Alleged Dichotomy

The 'thing' against which postmodernism is most often described as setting itself - the thing called modernism - was midwifed into existence by Kant's angry reaction to the blindness of metaphysics and the emptiness of empiricism. Although he championed it with some qualifications, what Kant offered in place of these pretenders was that most precious child of the Enlightenment: reason. Through reason (and only through reason) 'could the universal, eternal, and the immutable qualities of all humanity be revealed' (Harvey, 1990: 12). As such knowledge accumulated, 'rational modes of thought promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition', and, especially, 'release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures' (ibid.).

As might be expected, once such a monolithic entity as modernism has been constituted, it becomes convenient and compelling to write as if everything that is not it is one other thing, in this case postmodernism. If modernism has been a quest for truth and reality and if its modus operandi has been positivism or objectivism, then everything that is not positivistic and objectivist is assumed to be thoroughly antagonistic to truth and reality. If, however, modernism itself was a cubist painting - with ambiguously related surfaces of reason, truth, certainty, objectivity, and positivism made to look like a unified whole - then a contemporary theorist who takes issue with one of these points might not take issue with all of them. This, it turns out, might well be the messy truth of postmodern thinking in psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Consider the following epistemologies.

British philosopher Roger Scruton (1994) argues that Kant's take on human beings knowing the world is not the final word, but it is the best one. We cannot look at the world from outside our concepts and know the world as it is. We cannot see it from no particular point of view, as God might. In fact, we could not even begin to think about the world if we did not believe that we were viewing it through concepts of objectivity and that our judgements of it would represent reality.

German critical theorist Jurgen Habermas argues that all human beings possess the same faculty of reason. We experience the results of reason's successful application when we find ourselves with dialogical consensus or in co-ordinated action with others. 'The intersubjectivity of the validity of communication rules is confirmed in the reciprocity of actions and expectations. Whether this reciprocity occurs or fails to occur can be discovered only by the parties involved; but they make this discovery intersubjectively' (1970: 141).

In his highly readable introduction to postmodernism, John McGowan (1991: ix) uses the term 'to designate a specific form of cultural critique that has become increasingly conspicuous in the academy since about 1975'. He understands postmodernism as referring to an antifoundationalist critique, but adds to this a positive dimension: a search for freedom and pluralism that accepts the necessity, if not the virtue, of norms to which people, institutions and practices are responsive.

American philosopher Simon Blackburn (1993: 4) takes what he calls a 'quasi-realist' position: 'that truth is the aim of judgment; that our disciplines make us better able to appreciate it, that it is, however, independent of us, and that we are fallible in our grasp of it'.

Jacques Derrida suggests that we read all texts deconstructively. We must 'work through the structured genealogy of its concepts in the most scrupulous and immanent fashion, but at the same time to determine from a certain external perspective that it cannot name or describe what this history may have concealed or excluded' (1981: 6). We might paraphrase Norris (1987), in his excellent account of Derrida's philosophical project, and say that the effect of Derrida's philosophy is to render 'intensely problematic' much of what passes for 'rigorous thought in psychoanalysis' (as well as in philosophy and literary theory). 'But this effect is not achieved by dispensing with the protocols of detailed, meticulous argument, or by simply abandoning the conceptual ground on which such arguments have hitherto been conducted' (Norris, 1987: 20).

Barnaby Barratt (1993), in his book Psychoanalysis and the Post-modem Impulse, offers a vision of psychoanalysis as a process of free-associative deconstruction - 'deconstructive and negatively dialectical in a subversively postmodern sense' rather than 'insight establishing and reflective in the modern philosophical sense' (Barratt, 1993: xiv).

Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (1980: 43), during a discussion of Nietzsche's reduction of truth to morality, takes the following position: 'Whenever a proposition seems evident, there operates a series of historical premises and predispositions towards acceptance or rejection on the part of the subject, and these predispositions are guided by an overriding interest in the preservation and development not simply of "life" as such, but of a particular form of life.'

Neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1982: 92) argues that there 'are two ways of thinking about various things'. We can think of truth 'as a vertical relationship between representations and what is represented'. We can also think of truth 'horizontally - as the culminating reinterpretation of our predecessors' reinterpretation'. He adds: 'It is the difference between regarding truth, goodness, and beauty as eternal objects which we try to locate and reveal, and regarding them as artifacts whose fundamental design we often have to alter' (ibid.).

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984: xxv) writes: 'I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.' For Lyotard, the postmodern world is made up of Wittgensteinian language games and 'the social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games' (ibid.). Even science needs to have rules that prescribe what moves are admissible into its language game. These prescriptions are the same sorts of presuppositions that form the foundation of any language game.

Where would one draw a line, on this roughly arranged continuum of perspectives, to separate modern from postmodern given the blend of continuities and breaks that simultaneously link and separate each one from its neighbours? 'Modernism' and 'postmodernism' are not homogeneous or unambiguous facts, but only partially successful attempts to locate and define intellectual centres of gravity. Psychoanalysts looking to this epistemological debate, in their effort to assess their attitudes toward their own interpretations, must tolerate greater heterogeneity than they might have hoped to find.

Three Faces of Postmodernism

The modernity/postmodernity debate can be seen to fall into three realms, each of which must be fully considered when tracing the impact of postmodernity upon psychoanalytic theory and practice. First, there is the aesthetic debate over modernism and postmodemism, which concerns above all the nature of representation in the contemporary epoch. Postmodernism, in this particular sense, concerns a particular set of aesthetic or cultural values which were first given expression in the domains of architecture, the plastic and visual arts, poetry and literature. In contrast to the high modernist ambitions of uncovering an inner truth behind surface appearances, postmodernism exhibits a new playfulness, a mixing of previous aesthetic distinctions of content and form, high and low culture, the personal and public realms. The modernist attempt to discover a 'deeper' reality is abandoned in the postmodern in favour of the celebration of style and surface. The preoccupation of modernism with principles of meaning and rationality is replaced with a tolerance for diversity and difference, the characteristics of which are reflected in a postmodern criticism which values irony, cynicism, pastiche, commercialism, and, in some cases, relativism (see Jameson, 1991), To portray the complexity of aesthetic surfaces and signs in the postmodern, Deleuze and Guattari (1977) invoke the metaphor of 'rhizome': a peculiar rootstock that is multidirectional, chaotic, and random in its expansion. In this new aesthetic experience, postmodernism is a self-constituting world, determined by its own internal movement and process.

The second area of debate has focused on the philosophical and cultural concepts of modernity and postmodernity. Here it has been argued that a postmodern approach is necessary to avoid the realist assumptions of the Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian tradition. Perhaps no other text has marked the intellectual terms of reference here as much as Lyotard's (1984) short treatise The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Postmodernism, writes Lyotard, 'designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts' (1984: xxv). The 'game rules' to which Lyotard refers involve a letting go of the grand narratives of traditional philosophy and science and an acceptance of the 'heteromorphous nature of language games'. Reason comes in many varieties. Two groups applying it effectively and adaptively to the same situation might well end up inventing, and living in, different Wittgensteinian language games without common ground rules. Here, the emphasis is away from forms of thought that promote uniformity and universality, and toward an appreciation of particularity, especially as regards the holding in mind of ambiguity and difference. Lyotard's position on postmodernism has been described as extreme insofar as it presents a radical separation of the nature of language games from their sociocultural context, and, as such, is said to threaten a complete fragmentation of subjectivity (see Norris (1993) and Eagleton (1990) for critical appraisals of Lyotard's more recent work).

Under postmodern theories of knowledge, there has been a profound questioning of foundationalism. Derrida (1978) argues that Western metaphysics is haunted by impossible dreams of certitude and transparency. Derrida, and the deconstructionism that his work has promoted, draws attention to the binary oppositions of textual practices and rhetorical strategies, using a poststructuralist conception of language as a differential play of signifiers to uncouple language from the world it seeks to colonize through acts of description. There will be in everything a writer writes or a patient says a contradiction that the author of the statement cannot acknowledge. As Stanley Fish (1989: 215) sums up the goals of a Derridean deconstructive reading, it will 'surface those contradictions and expose those suppressions'. As a result, such a reading will expose those ideas or feelings which have been suppressed (repressed or dissociated, we might add). These exposures 'trouble' the apparent unity of the text. We say that this unity has been defensively constructed. Deconstructivists say that such a unity was achieved in the first place 'only by covering over all the excluded emphases and interests that might threaten it'. According to Fish, Derridean deconstruction does not uncover these contradictions and dialectic hiding operations of rhetoric in order to reach 'the Truth; rather it continually uncovers the truth of rhetorical operations, the truth that all operations, including the operation of deconstruction itself, are rhetorical' (1989: 215). From this standpoint, there is no philosophical or ideological position that is able to claim ultimate authority or justification. On the contrary, the justification of knowledge, as the postmodern pragmatist Richard Rorty has argued, is always a matter of argumentation from different positions and perspectives, such that our beliefs about the world are necessarily local, provisional, and contingent.

The third area of debate is concerned more explicitly with the personal, social, and cultural aspects of postmodern society. Here the issue concerns the way in which postmodernity affects the world of human selves and of interpersonal relationships. And it is at the level of our personal and cultural worlds, we suggest, that postmodernism most forcefully breaks its links with the ontological premises of modernity. By this we mean to focus attention on contemporary culture and its technologies, and in particular the ways in which globalization and instantaneous communication are transforming self-identity and interpersonal relationships. Globalization, transnational communication systems, new information technologies, the industrialization of war, universal consumerism: these are the core institutional dimensions of contemporary societies, and most students of contemporary culture agree that such transformations carry immense implications as regards selfhood, self-identity, and subjectivity (Frosh, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Thompson, 1990). The transformation of personal experience that postmodernity ushers into existence concerns, among other things, a compression of space and mutation of time, rapid and at times cataclysmic forms of change, an exponential increase in the dynamism of social and economic life, as well as a growing sense of fragmentation and dislocation. Such transformations, to repeat, are not only social in character; on the contrary, they penetrate to the core of psychic experience and restructure unconscious transactions between human subjects in new, and often dramatic, ways (see Elliott, 1996).

It is from this flux and turmoil of contemporary social life that many commentators have branded postmodernity as antihistorical, relativist and disordered. Postmodernism, in this reading, represents the dislocation of meaning and logic, whether of society or of the mind. It is possible to hold a more optimistic view of this apparent cultural disorientation, however, once the irreducibility of the plurality of human worlds is accepted. The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993), for example, argues that post-modernity represents a new dawning, rather than a twilight, for the generation of meaning. 'Postmodernity', Bauman (1991: 35) writes, '...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Rethinking Psychoanalysis in the Postmodern Era
• 1 Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn
• 2 Final Analysis: Can Psychoanalysis Survive in the Postmodern West?
• 3 Postmodernism and the Adoption of Identity
• 4 The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory
• 5 The Ambivalence of Identity: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Space Between Modernity and Postmodernity
• 6 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism
• 7 From Ghosts to Ancestors: The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald
• 8 The Dialectically Constituted/Decentred Subject of Psychoanalysis
• 9 Why the Self Is, and Is Not, Empty: Trauma and Transcendence in the Postmodern Psyche
• 10 The Struggle to Imagine
• Index