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1. A shortened version of this paper was presented to the 46th IPA conference, Berlin 2008.
Notes
1. A shortened version of this paper was presented to the 46th IPA conference, Berlin 2008.
2. The term ‘postmodernism’ has a very wide range including literature, architecture, music, art, etc. This paper, however, addresses not these aesthetic forms (of which the author is an admirer), but instead an epistemological position, associated with postmodernism, that expresses an extreme form of relativism.
3. See especially pp. 101–3.
4. It is worth noting here the moral tone. Claiming that one view might be broader, more accurate than another is understood as giving it a special ‘privilege’.
5. Freud rightly saw himself as following the other ‘Great De‐centrers’. First was Copernicus who removed the earth, and so man, from being placed at the centre of the universe. Next came Darwin who removed man from his central place in nature.
6. This and many other related epistemological and cultural points (too many to mention) touched on in this paper, are discussed at length by Terry CitationEagleton (1996) in his brilliant The Illusions of Postmodernism.
7. This mode of explanation is also characteristic of ‘depth sociology’ where manifest social phenomena are viewed as the outward expression of deeper structural forces.
8. The finding of continuity in the apparently discontinuous extends beyond the individual patient to broader concerns. Freud showed the normal in the abnormal: even the most bizarre symptoms had as their content concerns which are universal to humanity. Postmodernism, of course, eschews all such universalist claims.
9. The reduction of psychoanalytic explanation of symptoms to meaning, and only meaning, in other words ‘the hermeneutic turn’, provides no place for this developmental perspective.
10. “The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding” (CitationWittgenstein, 1978).
11. A slave may say he is happy, that his master is good to him, and allows him one whole day off in thirty days and treats him in a kind fatherly way. His happiness, which is a fact of his life, is his subjective condition but in itself tells us nothing of whether or not he is oppressed. This might be based on a judgement of factors such as how much real freedom and control he has of his conditions. His belief in his freedom may be an illusion, false consciousness.
12. This issue and others closely related to this theme are more fully discussed by Christopher CitationLasch (1984) in his somewhat prophetic book The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (see particularly pp. 34–8).
13. As in the shopping mall the appearance of plurality, consumer choice, is quite illusory, for what is offered is the deadening of experience as all shopping malls look the same.
14. This quotation is from Hegel (1812) and was cited by Engels in ‘Anti‐Duhring’. The full quotation reads as follows: “Hegel was the first to state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him, freedom is the recognition of necessity, ‘Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood’ ”.
15. Interestingly, a similar position is taken by many of the critics of psychoanalysis. Although proceeding from a completely different standpoint, they have looked for validation of the core claims of psychoanalysis only within the accounts of treatments, e.g. by re‐examining Freud’s cases (see Grunbaum, 1986). Grunbaum profoundly misunderstands Freud, as he believes that according to Freud’s theory psychic change should result simply from knowledge of facts. He does not seem to understand that it is the overcoming of resistance, not the knowlege of facts, that is at the core of the psychoanalytic understanding of psychic change (for an excellent discussion of this, see CitationWollheim, 1993).
16. CitationEsman (1998) has helpfully pointed out that the engagement of psychoanalysis with literature, social theory, philosophy, etc. gives important access to it for those who are not analysts and have no wish to be analysed, offering them the opportunity to judge for themselves the value of the explanatory system it offers.
17. Wittgenstein makes a related point in connection with the problem of other minds. He points out that we do not decide whether or not a person is a person like us: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (CitationWittgenstein, 1953, p. 178, italics in original).