Psychoanalytic “Problems” and Postmodern “Solutions”

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A number of recent revisions of psychoanalytic theory implicitly draw on postmodern conceptualizations of human selves and human subjectivity. Though postmodern ideas have a wide currency in the humanities and in literary criticism, and are increasingly represented in critiques of science, psychoanalytic clinicians are generally less familiar with the body of writings that encompass postmodernist thought. This paper discusses the evolution of postmodernism and its emergence into psychoanalytic theory using the work of Roy Schafer and Irwin Hoffman as cases in point. I will suggest that when postmodernism is applied to psychoanalytic practice, the result is only a partial solution, at best, to the problems of metapsychology postmodernist revisions were intended to resolve.