Lyddon and Weill (in this issue) attempt an impossible task, i.e., to describe, explicate, and defend an epochal shift in recent history from modernism to postmodernism-a shift as radical and transformative as that between the classic and medieval epochs. Ramifications of this shift are then trained on necessary modifications in how cognitive therapy is conceptualized and administered. Central to their description of postmodernism is their championing of a particular social theory and epistemology, namely, social constructionism. In this brief comment, we attempt to do three things: (1) provide representative anecdotes (Burke, 1945) of the experience of a resident in the "postmodern" world, (2) use these anecdotes as a way to describe new pathologies emergent in postmodernism and their implications for the theory and practice of psychotherapy, and (3) assess whether Lyddon and Weill's directives require the postmodern "grounding" they attempt to give them. REPRESENTATIVE ANECDOTES OF THE POSTMODERN EXPERIENCE (a) Imagine beginning a painting. You willfully select a certain canvas, palette, and brushes, and you begin your painting with a clear plan and strategy. At an unanticipated threshold, you lose your self-reflective control of the application of paint and begin to respond to emerging demands that the picture-under- construction seems to make: you execute strokes that the composition and its constitutive traditions are now actively inviting, if not requiring you to make. In this new collaboration in the activity of painting, time melts, sense of self dissolves, and what remains is a new aesthetic epiphany in which painting clearly goes on and a work of art emerges, but its origin can no longer be traced back to your plans, your composition, your technique. Now substitute for the canvas multiple interlocutors who undergo the very same experience of the aforementioned painter, creating together aesthetic conversation that cannot be traced back to any self- possessed, individual plan or strategy. This epiphanic moment is extended across all instances of dialogue to produce an enduring ecstasy of involvement in emergent situations. Here is the "carnival" of postmodernism, the poetry of social constructionism. The individual "self is no longer an experiential datum; in its stead is the shared home of past and present effervescing dialogue. (b) Imagine life represented by a piece of paper on which grids can be drawn. Vertical lines define differentiated opportunities, horizontal lines represent degree of mobility. Each cell defines a situation in which a person participates in a role. To enter a role an individual dons a certain "mask." Putting on and taking off masks, like mixing and applying paint, is an activity imbued with a sense of plan, strategy, will-i.e., the effortful work of impression management. With the proliferation of lines of opportunity and mobility, both real and imagined, cells proliferate, requiring the individual to assume an ever greater number of masks and to exchange them with an ever-increasing rapidity. At a certain threshold of opportunity and mobility, the instrumental effectiveness of self-possessed plans and management strategies dwindles. Improvisations, not planned presentations of self, are now required. Situations elicit, provoke, or otherwise impose masks (just as the canvas "imposed") that the improvisers find themselves wearing, without their own management. The fragmented and kaleidoscopic transitions between situations engender a pace of activity in which the underlying "self is absorbed into the process of social exchange. Imagine that such a transition happens to everyone. No longer are there underlying "selves" who manage impressions and who express themselves through purposefully donned masks, but only the disconnected series of masks required of all participants in myriad, locally defined situations. Here is the improvisational theater of postmodernism, in which the stages are occupied by actors who take their cues, not from master scripts, but from the props and characters involved with them at the moment. …
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Oct 5, 2023
Alison Wilson + 1
Open Access