The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 56, No.

4, 1996

W H A T P O S T M O D E R N I S M C A N D O FOR
PSYCHOANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO THE
POSTMODERN VISION

Lois Shawver

Postmodernism has much to offer psychoanalysis, but first we must res-

cue it from the dusty shelves of philosophy without letting it slip into the
trivialized slogans of controversy.
We will get around the problem of dusty obscurity by giving experiential
portrayals of postmodern concepts and, whenever possible, thought experi-
ments to bring these ideas to life. It will further clarify these concepts when
we notice that many have been foreshadowed in familiar psychoanalytic
writings. It can even be argued that what was so revolutionary in Freud's
thinking was the postmodern element in his theories (cf. Barratt, 1993).
Postmodernism examines the way language functions not only to inform
but to distort. Psychoanalysis does this, too. Freud's discussion of jokes, his
analysis of negation, his account of the way symptoms and dreams are
often the instantiation of metaphor--these are all examples of the many
postmodern elements in his work. Moreover, there are passages in Karen
Horney's work, as we will see, that provide us with postmodern insights.
These more familiar postmodern concepts will be a good place to set an-
chor for a more expanded description of postmodernism.
To avoid the trivializing effects of slogans we will simply sail past all the
interesting political questions posed by postmodernism--questions about
feminism, queer theory, multiculturalism. The postmodern challenge to
dominant culture and its advocacy for the oppressed can turn postmodern's
profundities into flat and unconvincing statements that leave people talking
past each other. If we are to harvest any clinical wisdom here, political
issues will have to wait while we focus our sights on what is clinically
more relevant.
We cannot, however, simply sail past the tangle of ideas in the writing of
the critics of postmodern psychoanalysis. These critics have woven a tight
web of redefined concepts that would lure us into a house of mirrors where

Lois Shawver,Ph.D., California School of ProfessionalPsychology,Alameda.

Address correspondence to Lois Shawver, Ph.D., 385 Bellevue Avenue, Oakland, CA
94610.
371
0002-9548/~6/1200-0371509.50/1 ~ 1996 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
372 SHAWVER

postmodernism looks more like a mental disease than a theory of human

experience. To get past this distraction we must stop and compare our
version of these concepts with the critics' version of them. We will find that
the critics replace the standard version of postmodern ideas with a set of
homonyms from vernacular language that has an entirely different mean-
ing. This is something like replacing the word ego in Freudian writing with
the homonym that means "arrogant" from vernacular language. It changes
the meaning of everything. It is like arguing that Gestalt theorists believe
that two plus two is more than four because they hold that the whole is
more than the sum of its parts. Postmodern insights collapse, of course, un-
der such redefinitions. Readers will have to judge which interpretation of the
postmodern vocabulary will take them on the more profitable journey.
However, if we can salvage postmodernism from these tangles, Derrida,
whose work is central to postmodernism, promises us a conceptual break-
through. He says, "Outside linguistics, it is in psychoanalytic research that
this breakthrough seems at present to have the greatest likelihood of being
expanded" (1976, p. 21). Postmodernism promises to contribute, then, to
the psychoanalytic project, but first we must determine what it is.
What is postmodernism? As it will be described here, postmodernism
has two parts: a deconstructive part that shows us that old ways of seeing
things are limited or wrong and a constructive part that enables our imag-
inations to construct new and useful ways of thinking. These two parts
work together. Often, it is the demonstrated new way of thinking that
serves to deconstruct and show the arbitrariness of the old.
A deeper appreciation of what postmodern theory can do for psycho-
analysis will, however, require us to learn to hear its technical vocabulary
in a nonvernacular way. For example, the new reader of postmodern writ-
ing needs to tune the ear to hear the words modern, modernity, or modern-
ist as referring to something other than "contemporary." In postmodern
writing, the modern is a foil, a person with exaggerated faith in the power
of science to illuminate our path to wisdom and human happiness. Listen
to a few passages and notice the way the term modern is being used:

IT]he idea of being "modern" . . . [was] inspired by modern science, in the

infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and
moral betterment. (Habermas, 1993, p. 99)

The enchantment of modernism derives importantly from its promise of prog-

ress-the belief that, with proper application of reason and observation, the es-
sences of the natural world may be made increasingly known, and that with such
increments in knowledge the society may move steadily toward a utopian state.
(Gergen, 1991, pp. 231-232)
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 373

I will use the term "modern" to designate any science that legitimates itself...
making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative.., such as the emancipation
of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. (Lyotard, 1993, p.
xxiii)

Moderns, then, are the children of the Enlightenment who dream of

progress through the application of purely objective methods, constructing
this vision "according to the model and pattern of contemporary science"
(Cassirer, 1951, p. 7). Postmoderns, on the other hand, shake off this infat-
uation with the Enlightenment science. We are told that: "Postmodernism
questions all the key commitments of the Enlightenment" (Lyon, 1994, p.
7). "Postmodernist discourse is constituted by and in a series of attempts to
close doors or paths back to Enlightenment modes of thinking or promises
of happiness" (Flax, 1989, p. 189). "[S]cience plays its own game, [and] it
is incapable of legitimating the other language games" (Lyotard, 1993, p.
40). "The existence of experimental methods makes us think we have the
means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and
methods pass one another by" (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 232, sec. xiv). These
authors are not rejecting what science has to give, but they are questioning
that science provides a complete method for clarifying human experience.
Postrnodernism tells psychoanalysis that the scientific method cannot take
us as far as we want to go, and it invites us along a different path.
It invites us to climb into a new language that can help us explore hid-
den structures in our thought. To prepare to use this language we will ex-
amine key terms in its vocabulary, terms like decentering, fictionalism, dif-
ferance, deconstruction, trace, erasure, and the metaphysics of presence.
We will examine the critic's trivialized versions of these concepts, explore
new phrases to replace the slogans, and generally try to animate post-
modern terms with definitions that can bring to life the power of this new
postmodern vision.

ANALYSIS OF POSTMODERN CRITICISM

Two criticisms have haunted postmodern theory in the writings of social

sciences. First, critics have complained that postmodernism would leave its
adherents fragmented and decentered, psychologically tattered like a
schizophrenic or a multiple personality. Second, critics have complained
that postmodernism is a simple relativism, ungrounded in anything solid,
that it holds that there are no truths, no absolute reality, that it provides us
only with fictions.
These terms have such negative connotations in American culture that
postmodernism loses potential supporters before they have had a chance to
374 SHAWVER

read a book on the topic. Who, after all, wants to read a theory that pro-
motes psychological pathology by a strange use of fictions and untruths?
But an examination of these criticisms will show that the critics have re-
defined the terms of postmodernism in ways that trade on figurative, ver-
nacular images of pathology.

Fragmentation vs. the Dialogic Character of Mind

Critics of postmodernism imagine, often enough, that a postmodern

treatment could cause patients to become psychologically fragmented or
disjointed (Flax, 1990; Glass, 1993; Leary, 1994; Layton, 1995; Passmore,
1985; Rivera, 1989; Sarup, 1989). Even friends of the postmodern will use
this metaphor of fragmentation (Gergen, 1991). But this unfortunate meta-
phor indicts postmodernism with its imagery because our cultural lore tells
us that anything called "psychological fragmentation" is inherently patho-
logical and even leads to a "terrifying slide into psychosis" (Leafy, 1994, p.
455, quoting Flax, 1990, with approval). Here is an example of an author
of an undergraduate college textbook telling students that fragmentation is
pathological. It means, according to this author, changing one's mind a lot
and not having a clear and unitary purpose or opinion.

The opposite of an alienated or fragmented person, an integrated person, has a

clear sense of identity. She knows what she values and why, and is therefore
strong. When we don't know who we really are or what is most important to us,
we keep changing our minds. We get something we wanted very badly and then
decide we don't like it. We have trouble making decisions because we are afraid
of losing out on something better later. (Soccio, 1992, p. 65).

Similarly, the postmodern term decentered also suggests that post-

modernism promotes a kind of fragmentation pathology. After all, in our
cultural vernacular, we say a person is "centered" and mean that the per-
son is well balanced, has common sense. If a centered person is well bal-
anced, then a decentered person, it would seem, is less well balanced.
For example, the critic of postmodern psychoanalysis, Kimberlyn Leary
(1994), argues also that postmodernism is pathological. She says:

The postmodern self seems . . . like the familiar self of the psychoanalytic con-
sulting room: a disjointed, decentered, and dislocated self seeking to ameliorate
this very condition . . . . In my view, a clinical diagnosis masquerades as a clinical
cure. (Lean/, 1994, pp. 454-455, emphasis added)
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 375

There is, however, nothing about the underlying postmodern insight that
requires us to use the metaphor of psychological fragmentation, a meta-
phor that colors the insight with a pathological imagery, or to think of
decentering as a kind of psychological imbalance. These pathologizing
metaphors revise the meaning of postmodern terms. If we cast the post-
modern vision in words more designed to characterize its insights, we may
find the postmodern's enthusiasm more understandable.
What modernists call "postmodern fragmentation" might be better called
the "dialogic character of our minds." This is our tendency to imagine an
audience for everything we say, to work out what the audience says and to
appreciate, at times, its power and be persuaded by it (Bakhtin, 1981;
Sampson, 1993; Hermans and Hermans-Jansen, 1995; Rothstein, 1993;
Watkins, 1990). The dialogic character of your mind manifests itself con-
cretely when you leave an argument with a friend and continue it in your
mind as you drive off. This is your ability to have a fantasy of two or more
people in a conversation while keeping straight what each person is say-
ing. Your mind creates both parts of the conversation, but separates the
thoughts as to whether they belong to you or the other person.
And so we can say that the inner conversation is composed of two kinds
of voices: the voice of the self, and the voices of others that are spoken of
collectively as the Other. Sometimes the Other may be the voice of a spe-
cific person such as one's mother (saying "button up your jacket"), but it
can be a vague voice such as the voice of the opposition in a political
dispute. Nevertheless, one knows these other voices so well that it is typ-
ically possible to reverse roles in a role-play and speak with them, saying,
perhaps, what one's political opponent might say. Sometimes the Other in
one's mind does not speak at all but simply provides an audience and a
context for one's private monologue. But what is most profound about the
concept of a dialogic mind is the realization that there is always a question
of identifying the owner of these voices. Suppose one hears oneself think-
ing critical thoughts of a person standing in the grocery line. Is this one's
own voice speaking? Or is one simply echoing the voice of someone who
says things one no longer endorses.~
The observation that the mind is dialogic is central to much psycho-
analytic theory. In psychoanalysis we might note that free-associating pa-
tients say what they do as a response to the imagined analyst who is the
subject of their transference. This imagined analyst is an important exam-
ple of an Other. Noting the importance of this dialogic character of the
mind, Lacan argued that the key to the Unconscious was to be found in
deciphering what the imagined Other was saying because the patient's re-
marks and associations were a response to this imagined Other. This imag-
376 SHAWVER

ined Other's voice gave the patient's free associations a transindividual or

dialogic character. Specifically, Lacan said:

The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse, in so far as it is transin-

dividual, that is not at the disposal of the subject in reestablishing the continuity
of his conscious discourse. (Lacan, 1977, p. 49)

[lit is speech functioning to the full, for it includes the discourse of the other in
the secret of its decipher. It was by deciphering this speech that Freud redis-
covered the primary language of symbols, still living on in the suffering of civi-
lized man. (Lacan, 1977, p. 69)

In order to rediscover the effect of Freud's speech [we need to look not to his
words but to the principles behind them.] . . . [And when we do, we see that]
Freud's discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process [in which we
learn who we are] authentically attains the subject by decentering him from the
consciousness-of-self. (Lacan, 1977, p. 80, emphasis added)

We do not want to suppress this dialogic character of our minds. It is

useful. Without it we would be mentally simple. To have an imagined
Other, a person must decenter and try to understand what the other is
saying (Sampson, 1985). Because we can imagine what the other person
might think or say, we can learn to understand other points of view, we can
influence and be influenced in return, we can empathize and identify with
others. This understanding of other points of view helps us step beyond the
savagery of good/bad, me/you dichotomies. Although a modernist critic
like Leary may call this a pathological "fragmentation," a little reflection
suggests that people who cannot identify in this way with the other per-
son's point of view are likely to be highly egocentric and self-biased.
One might imagine that a habit of decentering, putting oneself in the
Other's shoes, would make a person less decisive, but this is probably not
so. If minds are naturally dialogic, then the attempt to simplify the mind
into a homogeneous unity should probably be seen as an unnatural sup-
pression of the voice of the Other in our minds. There are passages in
which Karen Homey argues that suppressing the conflicting voices in our
minds is unhealthy. Listen to her take a postmodern stance in a pre-post-
modern vocabulary:

Any conflict within or without can vanish from sight and actually be (arti-
ficially) diminished if one aspect of it is suppressed and the other made predomi-
nant. Speaking in terms of two people or two groups with conflicting needs and
interests, the open conflict disappears when an individual or group is subdued.
Between a bullying father and subdued child there is no visible conflict. The
same holds true for inner conflicts. We may have a sharp conflict between our
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 377

hostility toward people and our need to be liked. But if we suppress the hostil-
i t y - o r the need to be liked--our relations tend to become streamlined. (Homey,
1991, pp. 177-178)

A few passages later she describes the "real self" as a self composed of a
complex of voices, a postmodern self. In fact, she seems to be thinking of
what postmoderns call a modern self, a streamlined and simplified self, as
what should be described as "fragmented" and pathological. She says,

Another general measure is the neurotic's tendency to experience himself in a

piecemeal way, as if we were the sum total of disconnected parts. This is known
in the psychiatric literature as compartmentalization, or psychic fragmentation.
(Homey, 1991, p. 179)

[The neurotic] may have [a] . . . strong interest in not perceiving contradictory
values coexisting in him. (Homey, 1991, p. 180)

[T]he tensions are kept in a low key because no conflict emerges and he can
maintain a deceptive feeling of unity. (Homey, 1991, p. 180)

In this context Horney is making the same point that postmoderns make
when they say we have multiple voices inside us that allow us to identify
with more than one point of view. When we try to suppress these voices,
we do not eradicate them. We merely alienate ourselves from a part of
ourselves and increase our experience of fragmentation. The task of be-
coming integrated psychologically is to learn to incorporate these different
voices in a sense of self that can live with and even celebrate the mental
complexity that results from the dialogical character of our minds. A post-
modern psychoanalysis facilitates our appreciation of the different voices
within us, voices from our childhood dramas, voices that argue with us, or
appreciate us. It helps us know these voices as part of who we are. It
might, for example, help a patient recognize the self in a dream that ap-
pears to be about another person.
But psychoanalysis is not always postmodern. Whenever psychoanalysts
pathologize the dialogic character of the patient's mind, assisting the effort
to suppress the alternative point of view, psychoanalysis abandons its post-
modernist stance and becomes modernist. This situation can be seen as
pathogenic for people can be made anxious by the modernist belief that
the inner self should have homogeneous desires and impulses when they
recognize that they personally experience conflicting desires. This mani-
fests itself in the modernist obsession with the question of how one really
is. An alternative impulse, say a homosexual feeling, causes such a person
to doubt a lifetime of heterosexual pleasure. A gentle person is imagined
378 SHAWVER

never to have a violent thought. The modernist patient searches for a sim-
ple pigeonhole to climb into. This desire to be completely simple, without
any texture of mixed feeling, is, so the postmodern holds, the pathology of
modernity (Levin, 1987).
Psychoanalysis is sometimes modern, but the roots of psychoanalysis are
largely postmodern (Barratt, 1993). Psychoanalysis is postmodern when it
helps patients hear themselves as speaking with censored voices. These
voices speak through dreams and fantasies in the imagined guise of other
people. The patient says, "1 think people want me to run away," and the
postmodern analyst helps the patient hear this statement as an expression
of a censored voice. The postmodern analyst might say, "Perhaps you
sometimes think that you should run away." The analyst helps patients own
some of their censored voices.
The critics may call the postmodern voices "fragments," but fragments
are pieces that do not relate. The shattered cup on the floor has been
broken into fragments that no longer relate to each other. In contrast, the
voices of others in our minds are our ties with other minds to which we
relate. These voices represent our concept of what other people want to
say. We carry that concept inside us as a voice that articulates their point of
view even when we disagree, even when we challenge their truth and
despise their content.
The successful postmodern identity emerges not in shattered, meaning-
less fragments but as a chorus of these many voices, as a continuous own-
ing and disowning of the voices in our dreams, visions, and desires that we
find within us. And the point of a postmodern psychoanalysis is not to
shatter the mind into uncommunicating segments, but to help people learn
to hear the underlying harmony and counterpoint among the voices in
their dialogic minds.

Fiction vs. Postmodern Poetizing and Differance

In the language of postmodern's critics, the postmodern believes that

words no longer refer to anything in the world. Critics hold that post-
modernism says there is only "text," and the text is only fiction. This is how
Lean/interprets Derrida. She says, "For Derrida, the 'real' could be shown
to be 'fictional'" (Lean/, 1994, p. 438). Understanding postmodernism in
this way leads critics to accuse postmoderns of nihilism and relativism (Al-
len, 1992; Geras, 1995; Leary,1994; Madison, 1992; Morawski, 1992;
Rosenau, 1992; Sass, 1992; Wolf, 1991).
And if one listens to postmodern words with a vernacular vocabulary,
inattentive to the technical meaning of these terms, there is much that can
be construed as telling us that there is nothing in this world but fiction.
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 379

Fiction, however, is a technical term in postmodernism, and we need to be

careful to look past the vernacular meaning of this term. This can be done
if we make a careful study of postmodern texts.
For example, Geha (1993, p. 211) expands on a theory he calls "fiction-
alism." He says, "All realities are mind made. If any others exist, we would
never know of them." This makes it sound as if Geha does not believe in a
world beyond words, thinks that everything is make-believe. However,
Geha does not mean quite what the critics think. That is why he also says
things like, "It must be realized at once what is not meant by fiction. It
does not designate something false or not real or nonexistent . . . . Neither
does it refer to something indifferent to, or aloof or exempt from, all con-
siderations of truth" (Geha, 1993, p. 212). Still, this is what the word fiction
means in ordinary English, so it is not surprising that even a thoughtful
critic such as Sass (1993) would assume that what Geha means by "fiction"
is what the word ordinarily means. Moreover, Geha's paper does not give
the reader a feel for what he does mean by fiction.
And Derrida chafes at interpretations of his work that make him sound as
though he does not believe in the world beyond words, and he tries to
teach a nonvernacular definition for his terms. He says that his well-known
phrase that there is "nothing outside the text" merely means "that one can-
not refer to this 'real' except in an interpretive experience" (Derrida, 1972,
p. 148). For example, the "real" is not just this letter on the dresser. It is the
letter with its meaning interpreted by the person who reads it. Derrida
explains, "The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in
general so badly understood, of deconstruction ('there is nothing outside
the text') means nothing else: there is nothing outside context" (Derrida,
1972, p. 136). This context is what makes sense of things, what crystallizes
meaningless puffs of unnoticed reality into the hard rock of the solid real.
Insights are hidden under this obscure use of language, but they are not
lost. If we look for the underlying insights, we see that postmoderns are
most likely to sound as if they are saying that we have only words and
nothing else, when they are trying to talk about the way language works to
affect how we notice and perceive that which lies beyond our words.
First, language directs our attention. "Look at that strange bird," someone
tells us. And it directs our attention. It shows us what to notice. Moreover,
it directs us to notice the way in which the bird is strange. "Look at that
hurt bird," someone else says, and we look to see how it is hurt. Our mind
goes, most often, where the language we hear directs it.
Second, language creates categories that structure our understanding.
Heidegger says, "The word alone gives being to the thing" (Heidegger,
1971, p. 62). For example, think of the big dipper in the sky. Before some-
one named it, it was merely a sprinkle of stars, but once it was named, it
380 SHAWVER

became a "thing." The name gave it "being," turned it from a scatter of

inconspicuous and uninteresting stars into a thing. The same might be
said for any disease syndrome. Before we noticed the "toxic shock syn-
drome," the elements of the syndrome did not hang together for us as a
thing. Language serves the purpose of organizing the world around us.
Before we learned to read, the nameless scribbles on the page were cha-
otic marks. Without a language to name the parts of a car engine, or the
parts of the brain, the elements and patterns seem shapeless. Language
gives being to these elements because it sheds light on patterns that have
gone unnoticed.
Language also gives being in the psychoanalytic process. Before the an-
alyst names a psychological pattern, say a tendency to view women as
mother figures, the underlying elements may exist inconspicuously, but the
pattern does not hang together as a thing. Naming it gives it being. Naming
it and talking about it highlights it, takes it out of the experiential shadows
and brings it to life inside our experiential world.
Although postmoderns use the word fiction to point to the way language
gives "being" to things, a better name for this process might be Heidegger's
word poetizing. A Heidegger interpreter explains this concept, saying, "The
basic characteristic of poetizing consists in bringing Being into words in a
truly originating manner" (cf. Kockelmans, 1984, pp. 196-208). Heidegger
uses this concept to show the way we introduce metaphor into our con-
ceptions. These metaphors then stay like relics of the past and fill our every
sentence, constituting a kind of hidden poetry in our everyday speech, a
vernacular poetry.
As a result, the words in our language are all relics of other vocabularies,
terms we have applied from other contexts. Levi-Strauss (1966) referred to
language as bricolage, the French word for objects we find at hand to
make do for another job, like using a stone for a hammer. Wittgenstein has
a similar picture of language. He says, "Our language can be seen as an
ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses,
and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by
a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform
houses" (Wittgenstein, 1965, sec. 18). This metaphorical nature of lan-
guage undercuts the ability of language to be objective. Even when a term
sounds objective, one can trace its metaphorical genealogy, as when
"horseless carriage" became an "automobile," and then a "car," and was
surrounded by a supporting metaphor that reflects this history, such as
"horsepower."
Given the nature of our vocabulary, it is inevitable that much of what we
say is implicitly contaminated by metaphorical imagery. Imagine, for ex-
ample, that the last sentence were edited to read, "much of what we say is
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 381

implicitly clarified by metaphorical imagery." A writer might deliberate

over whether to write "contaminated" or "clarified," but the decision could
not be justified by considerations of accuracy. Yet the term could make a
difference. One term gives us the imagery of germs and disease and sug-
gests that metaphor is bad, whereas the other gives us the imagery of crys-
tal clarity and suggests that metaphors are good. Whenever we talk, "The
message [we wish to express] is effectively nuanced by the vehicle of the
metaphor" (Ingram, 1994, p. 187), for "[w]e predicate of a thing what lies
in the method of representing it" (Wittgenstein, 1965, sec. 104). It is in this
way that language poetizes reality.
Listen to other examples of how vernacular language can poetize reality.
Each of these pairs of concepts can be used to describe much the same
behavior, but they cast a different spin on the reality they describe. We
could say the same man was either "opinionated" or someone who "knows
his own mind." The same woman might be poetized as "easygoing" or as
"lazy." And we might call the same person either "youthful" or "immature"
(see Shawver, 1977). Women's menstruation can be poetized as a "curse"
or as a "symbol of womanhood" (Shawver, 1983). These are all just differ-
ent ways of describing much the same referent, different ways of poetizing
reality, of implicitly weaving images into the world we touch, hear, and
see. Such poetic language permeates our everyday speech and implicitly
guides our minds (Brunet and Feldman, 1994; Gibbs, 1994; Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980; Hallyn, 1990).
And it is not only the everyday world that is woven with metaphor. Our
most sophisticated, scientific theories are woven with metaphors (e.g., Ar-
bib and Hess, 1986; Bonno, 1990; Brown, 1976, 1994; Bruner and Feld-
man, 1994; Carroll and Mack, 1985; Hesse, 1966; Hoffman, 1980; Jones,
1982; Kuhn, 1979; Leary, 1990; Sarbin, 1990). These metaphors, such as
our concept of the atom as a tiny solar system, or of a set of atoms as a set
of billiard balls, simplify the math of scientific findings in order to put our
abstractions into a language that makes sense to us. The fiction of post-
modernism is not flight of fancy, not stories about people who never were.
It is the poetry of our understanding, our everyday consciousness, and our
most scientific writing.
A postmodern psychoanalysis notices and studies the poetizing function
of a patient's language. It uses it to trace hidden desire behind slips of the
tongue or chance associations. For example, postmodern understanding
leads the analyst to ponder how the anorectic patient's mind is still
haunted by the way her father poetized her enthusiastic consumption of
pancakes one afternoon when he said that she was a "greedy fat pig," how
the metaphoric elements of that "being a pig" get played out in symptoms
or dreams. Postmodernism calls our attention to the way imagery carried in
382 SHAWVER

our vernacular language can catch the neurotic in a web of unpleasant

pathology.
Another term that needs to be rescued here from philosophical obscurity
is Derrida's term differance. It is a key term in postmodernity and it will
help explain how language creates and deconstructs "being" through ver-
nacular poetizing.
The word differance, spelled with an "a," is a coined term, and Derrida
contrasts it with the vernacular term difference. Patterns of "Difference,"
he explains, "[are] . . . 'produced'--deferred--by 'differance'" (Derrida,
1982a, p. 14). But what does this mean? That difference is deferred by
differance?
Imagine observing a quilt on the wall with patches of yellow, blue, and
white. If you notice the yellow and the nonyellow, you see a pattern of
concentric boxes. If you notice the blue and the nonblue, you see a check-
ered design. Each pattern is a play of differences, but it is a different set of
differences when yellow is differentiated from nonyellow than when blue
is differentiated from nonblue, a different set of differences that shows us
different patterns.
What is interesting about this shift from one pattern to the other is that it
not only calls our attention to a new pattern, but that it suppresses our
awareness of the other pattern. Differance defers a pattern of differences
(say the pattern of differences between the blue and the not-blue). That is,
one pattern of differences pushes into the background another possible
play of patterns. You cannot study the pattern of yellows and the pattern of
blues at the same time because differance causes one or the other patterns
to be "deferred." Differance is the hidden way of seeing things that is de-
ferred out of awareness by our distraction with the imagery that captures
our attention. Because it contains this other way to see things, "Differance
is t h e . . , formation of form" (Derrida, 1976, p. 63). It is the "historical and
epochal 'unfolding' of Being" (Derrida, 1982a, p. 22).
And so it is when neurotic anxiety presses impulses into the Uncon-
scious, that which becomes unconscious has been deferred and slipped
behind the play of differance. No one is more aware of this process than
the psychoanalyst who watches the patient use language to distract. When
the analyst traces the unspoken issue in dreams and transference, the an-
alyst is finding what Derrida might call the "trace" of the unspoken issue
looking out from the realm of differance. Differance is the play of other
possible conceptions that are outside awareness, but that leaves its trace
even in consciousness.
Indeed, one might almost say that the Unconscious is the Freudian inter-
pretation of differance. Differance is all of that which we are refusing entry
into our explicit awareness but which remains somehow present in our
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 383

consciousness as a "trace" (Derrida, 1982a, pp. 20-21). The Unconscious

would be differance if only psychoanalysis remembered to ask how partic-
ular meta-narratives--such as that of Oedipus--serve the unconscious in-
terests of psychoanalysts. For differance is the hidden of every story. The
trace is the obscured remnant of what is hidden, the unconscious wish, or
disowned motive, that can sometimes be brought into the presence of con-
sciousness. This trace "erases itself in presenting itself, muffles itself in reso-
nating" (Derrida, 1982a, p. 23).
We make a straw man of the postmodern position when we hold as
Lean/ (1994) does that postmodernism refers to a theory that there is no
reality, only words, and that the words are fiction in the vernacular sense of
that term. Such an interpretation is based on a trivializing of these con-
cepts. Of course, there is a reality there beyond our words, but people who
have mastered a language only notice and attend to the world in ways that
are mediated by language. Language gives Being to our psychological
worlds by providing us with a metaphorical lens that enables us to see
some of what is there by distracting us from other dimensions that become
hidden--and each of us continuously revises this lens with the living
magic of our language.

DESTRUCTION VERSUS POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION

Perhaps the most important concept in postmodernism is, however, de-

construction. Deconstruction is central to postmodernism but, unfor-
tunately, it sounds like the word destruction, and a certain line of criticism
about deconstruction can leave people thinking that postmodernism is a
philosophy of destruction, despair, and nihilism (Finlay, 1989; Leary, 1994;
Madison, 1992; Rosenau, 1992; Sherwood, 1994; Young, 1989). Every-
thing that we believe in can be destroyed, so the critic fears, leaving us in a
trap of meaninglessness relativism, a "fluid anchorless sense of reality"
(Lyon, 1994, pp. 7-8).
But, from another perspective, deconstruction is a way of freeing our-
selves from the trap of ineffective language patterns. The deconstructionist
is like someone who shows us that just because something looks like a
door doesn't mean it can open and let us into another room. Realizing that,
we can set about to locate more effective doors.

What Deconstruction Means

Jacques Derrida introduced the term deconstruction into our current lit-
erature when he popularized a little used term of Martin Heidegger's. What
it means is this: If naming something gives it being (in the sense that nam-
384 SHAWVER

in 8 the "bi 8 dipper" gave the bi 8 dipper being), then deconstruction shows
us a glimpse of the world that has not yet been given this particular being.
We begin to notice the big dipper is made of stars and that it was a kind of
illusion that they belonged together in the unity of a "thing" (Derrida,
1976, 1981, 1985). "The word [deconstruction has] signified a certain at-
tention to [conceptual] structures . . . . Structures were to be undone, de-
composed, desedimented" (Derrida, 1988, p. 2).
Deconstruction is possible because our psychological worlds are struc-
tured with differance. That is, there is always a hidden depth interpretation
we have not yet seen. "Deconstruction does not consist in passing from
one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual
order" (Derrida, 1982b, p. 329). Deconstruction lifts us out of the domi-
nant paradigm , the dominant metaphor or poetry, and invites us to dance a
different dance. It simultaneously defers this dominant perspective while it
recovers the imagery that had been hidden in the conceptual shadows of
deferred attention.
In more Wittgensteinian terms, deconstruction is the philosophical prac-
tice that "consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose" (Witt-
8enstein, 1965, sec. 127). These reminders serve to demystify us about our
presumption that the way we happen to have poetized the world is the
only way it could be poetized. Our effort to demystify ourselves like this
involves us in "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by
means of a language" (Wittgenstein, 1965, sec. 109). Deconstruction de-
mystifies us, then, by reminding us of things we already know at a point in
our inquiry that we are inclined to forget or to defer them.
How are we mystified by language? We are mystified by the poetic im-
agery implicit in our language, or, our tendency to confuse the way we talk
in one context (a more literal context) with that in another. (Wittgenstein
called this a confusion of language games.) Our language practices mislead
us into expecting the world to be more precisely what the imagery in our
language suggests it is. "A simile that has been absorbed into the forms of
our language produces a false appearance" (Wittgenstein , 1965, sec. 112).
For example, our language expresses the imagery of fault on the model
of owning an object. Just as we say, "Whose book is that?" we say, "Whose
fault is that?" and this tells us that the ownership of the fault belongs to a
particular person, just as the ownership of a book belongs to a particular
person. And so we want to place the blame on an individual even though a
little deconstruction shows us that things are never that simple. Our lan-
guage deludes us into thinking that people are simple causes when even a
little investigation beneath the surface shows us that the person we
"blame" is not the whole cause, that that person was part of a chain of
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 385

causes, and part of an interactive cycle. We know this, but something

about our language tends to push it out of mind.
Becoming demystified means that we can now see the illusion. We can
see that, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it
lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably"
(Wittgenstein, 1965, sec. 115).

The Deconstruction of the Metaphysics of Presence

One of the most important postmodern deconstructions is the decon-

struction of the "metaphysics of presence." It is a deconstruction that is
especially important for psychoanalysis and helps to explain the power of
psychoanalysis in the modernist world.
The metaphysics of presence tells us that what is real is the here and
now and that the past and the future are unreal. This metaphysics pervades
the Western way of thinking. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, Western
"Philosophy has been a 'metaphysics of presence,' the only metaphysics
we know" (Culler, 1982, p. 92). This is because our culture uses metaphors
that make the present seem more real than the past or the future. We are
continuously bombarded by a family of metaphors implicit in our vernacu-
lar language that tell us, over and over again, that the present is the real,
that the past and the future are not real.
The metaphysics of presence is deconstructed when we are shown that
time can be experienced differently, as will be illustrated shortly. The "de-
construction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction
of consciousness" (Derrida, 1976, p. 70). This does not mean that we
lose consciousness in the course of the deconstruction, but that in reading
the text that deconstructs the sense of the here and now is altered for
the moment. Reading and attending to the text can produce a brief shift in the
meaning of the present by replacing our culture's standard imagery for time
with an imagery that our culture once embraced but has largely forgotten.
To prepare to experience the deconstruction it will help to refresh your
mind with our modern Western images of time. Later we will deconstruct
these images to illustrate the concept of deconstruction. But to understand
the deconstruction you must first do what Derrida calls "inhabiting" the
metaphysics. To do that, try to yield your mind for the moment to the flow
of images in the following paragraph:

You are sitting in your office reading this journal. Your body feels the chair
around you, the floor beneath your feet, your hands at the edge of the book. You
feel this. This is the real. All the same, you recall for a moment the image of your
386 SHAWVER

hand scribbling with a Crayola when you were a child. The moment that you
recall "used to be," but it is no longer the real. Somehow your mind has made a
copy of the real that used to be and stored it for your occasional recollection, but
this reality of you as a child has passed. Make your mind return, now, to the real,
to the present that surrounds you. Today your memory of your childhood scrib-
bling lives only in your mind. Nevertheless, your memory provides you with a
copy, a kind of corpse of a reality that once existed but is no longer. This journal,
the room that surrounds you now, this is the real now.

This is the sense of time that predominates in our Enlightenment culture,

but postmodernism tells us that this sense of time is a mental set that is
rooted in the imagery of our language. It is possible, so postmodernism
says, to deconstruct this sense of time. We can do that by imagining a
culture that poetizes the past as the real and the present as a mere copy of
the past. Imagining such a culture n o w should produce for the attentive
reader a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence that underlies the
Western cultural experience of time. It should give a brief glimpse of how
the world would appear if time were poetized as a metaphysics of the past,
as it was for centuries before the Enlightenment. Try for the moment to
create this very different mental imagery that the following words suggest:

Imagine a culture that treasures a group of old clay tablets containing legible
marks. These tablets, so legend has it, were inscribed by the ancestors who gave
this tribe life and continue to give life with the joy of each new child. One must
study hard at the foot of a master to learn to read these tablets, but those who do
so have the privilege of decipherin 8 the magic of many precious messages. So
precious are the messages that each day a group of eager readers gather with
their lanterns in the dark damp caves to read them with rapt attention. As they
mouth the words, they learn of a land of lush romantic beauty. The odd carvings
on these stones fill their minds with images of flowing brooks, huge gaudy
flowers, chirping birds that would actually sit on your shoulder with their lon 8
soft plume-like tails hanging like draping rainbows down to your knees. And
there, kneeling in the flickering light, these readers learn of secret answers to the
mysteries of their lives. They learn of birth and death, and what it means, of how
to live, of how to hunt and fish, of how to cook their food, of how to dig a grave.
Nothing seems possible without these words. One passage provides an incanta-
tion to purify the water, another turns boys into men, and the recitation of an-
other unites men and women in matrimony. Every action that their minds imag-
ine, that they care about, is guided by the sacred words on these old stones.
Wisdom to the members of this tribe comes by committing these precious words
to memory, copying the words and images into their heads so they may be recol-
lected as guidance and reassurance in times of need. For such a tribe, at least,
the past is surely real. Their present consists only in a daily struggle to make their
lives fill with images from the past and to conform to the guidance of the past.
For them, the present is but a faulty copy of the past.
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 387

To glimpse the world through this metaphysics of the past is to decon-

struct, for a moment, our culturally dominant Enlightenment metaphysics
of presence. In that Enlightenment metaphysics you immersed yourself in
the experience of sitting in the present, feelin 8 the journal in your hands
and the floor beneath your feet. The flashing memory of your childhood
was the unreal. The past, in that metaphysics, was the corpse of what was
once the real. In contrast, in the tribal metaphysics the past was alive and it
animated the present. The present copied the past. Mouthin 8 the words on
the sacred tablets brought images to mind that copied the past and pro-
duced a sense of bein 8 protected and guided by past strength and wisdom.
Postmodernism tells us that these different metaphysics are carried in the
hidden imagery of our language. Notice that hidden imagery now. In creat-
in 8 the right mood for the metaphysics of presence, we called the memory
of your childhood hand a mere "copy of the real stored in your recollec-
tion." The past was dead, we said, a corpse, only a copy of the present that
was real. Then, when we switched to the tribal experience, we switched
our metaphors. Here it was the present that copied the past. The past ani-
mated the present, left the mind filled with images, thoughts, and feelings
that arose from the ancient words left to the tribe on the tablets.
In his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, Derrida says:

Writing in the common [Enlightenment] sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of
death. It exhausts life. On the other hand, on the other face of the same proposi-
tion, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine, and living writing, is vene-
rated; it is equal in dignity to the origin of value, to the voice of conscience as
divine law, to the heart, to sentiment, and so forth. (Derrida, 1976, p. 17)

Which is really the copy? The past or the present? Whenever we claim
that only one is the real, we defer to differance the other possible way of
seein 8 the world. Each contains a metaphysics, so postmodernism tells us,
that brings with it a way of life.
Each metaphysics slips in through the implicit imagery in the way we
speak. When language is being used effectively, we do not notice this im-
agery, but it is there in all but the most artificial and mathematical kinds of
languages. Moreover, we can study it and sometimes deconstruct its imag-
ery if we look closely. Saying the memory of your childish scribbling was a
record or a copy of a time that used to be and was no longer made the past
seem no longer rooted in the real. Saying that the tribesmen mouthed the
words on sacred tablets and had their minds animated with the ancient
imagery made the present consciousness seem but a copy of the past.
But whether we say the past is a copy of the present, or the present is a
copy of the past, these are only metaphorical images. There are no copies
388 SHAWVER

here in the sense that a Xerox is a copy. We are simply noticin 8 that both
memory and consciousness are like copies. According to one metaphysics,
the past is a corpse and the present is the real. According to the other, the
past is the living real that animates the present that is only a theater in
which the past is forever replayed.
Neither metaphysics is more correct than the other. They are just two
different ways humans have of poetizing time. Two sides of the same coin.
One must always be deferred. One side is always deferred on the other
side of differance where it exists as a trace, as something, Derrida would
say, we put under "erasure." "Under [this erasure] the presence of [a reality
beyond our words] is effaced while still remaining legible" (Derrida, 1976,
p. 23). Differance keeps within itself the mark of the past and the future
(Derrida, 1982a, p. 13). It works this way because of the limits of our
language to capture the unspoken reality as it is. It is the nature of our
language to highlight something of that reality only by deferring something
else, pushing something into awareness in the very act of pushing some-
thing else out.
But if language only gives us a unidimensional picture of the three-di-
mensional world, several pictures together can sometimes be embraced to
create a sense of a three-dimensional world. We cannot look at the back-
side of reality while we are staring at the front, but knowing it has a back-
side helps us gather a sense of the way things fit together. The point of
deconstruction is not to overthrow the Enlightenment perspective, but to
enrich our understanding by helping us decenter and see other points of
view. We do not need to honor the real as what was written in the tablets
of our culture over the present that is liberated from the past. "[N]othing
would be more ridiculously mystifyin 8 than such an ethical or axiological
reversal, returnin 8 a prerogative to some elder's right to writing" (Derrida,
1981, p. 13). Deconstruction is merely the demystification of the assump-
tions built into our language and this can enhance our ability to see past
those assumptions and to gain a clearer picture of the world beyond our
words.
But it seems that the Enlightenment metaphysics mesmerized our culture
with a poetry that taught us to see only the present as the real. In this
context, classical psychoanalysis has power because psychoanalysis is cul-
turally out of step with the Enlightenment. Psychoanalysis deconstructs the
metaphysics of presence by showing the patient how the present is an
enactment of past dramas, how the present is a copy of the past, and what
we feel to be a response to a present context can be seen as a response to a
historical one. Psychoanalysis not only deconstructs the metaphysics of
presence but it elaborates a metaphysics of history, provides us with a set
of images that shed light on the way in which our lives are dominated by
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 389

our histories. And, in a world that seems to consist only of what is present,
this deconstruction of presence provides our lives with a sense of en-
hanced meaning and depth.
Critics of deconstructionism often fail to appreciate the meaning of the
"deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence." Leary (1994, p. 438), for
example, dismisses the "metaphysics of presence" as a synonym for the
word real. She says, "Derrida argued that philosophy has been led astray
by the search for referents and the desire to claim the 'real,' what he called
the 'metaphysics of presence.'" In her interpretation of things, deconstruct-
ing this metaphysics leaves us without a past. She says, "In key respects,
postmodernism purges the analytic situation of the need to grapple with
history, with things that once were and had an effect . . . . [P]atient and
a n a l y s t . . , are wedded to a constantly unfolding present" (Leary, 1994, p.
457). Actually, the deconstruction of presence can result in a greater sense
of the past. And although it is true that postmodern psychoanalysts such as
Hoffman (e.g., 1991) may focus treatment so that it highlights the present,
others such as Schafer (1992) teach how to retell the narrative of our lives
so as to animate the present with a sense of past.

CONCLUSIONS
The critics of postmodern psychoanalysis hide the power of this new
vision by replacin 8 its technical concepts with homonyms, that is, with
ordinary language terms that sound the same but have different meanings.
Translated in this way, postmodernism sounds foolish, but it is rather like
trying to understand ego psychology by interpreting "ego" as meaning
something like "arrogant." For example, the critics seem to think of "de-
centered" in terms of the vernacular concept of being "unbalanced," but
the postmodern term decentered means something more like "putting one-
self in the other person's shoes" or "looking at the world, empathically, as
if from the other person's consciousness." The critics of postmodern psy-
choanalysis, therefore, have simply reduced postmodernism to a straw man
theory that no one should endorse.
Even so, there is something inconsistent in their critique. Their major
complaint seems to be that postmodernism is insufficiently objective. We
might take this to mean that they believe it is too metaphorical, too prone
to create imaginative pictures, too little anchored in hard facts and a belief
in hard facts. If this is their main criticism, it is paradoxical that a critic
such as Leary makes her major arguments against postmodernism in the
language of rhetorical metaphors.
For example, Leary says that postmodern authors "all disavow the notion
that human beings have any essential or unitary core" (1994, p. 441). But
390 SHAWVER

Leary, surely, does not hold that the self has a core in the straightforward
way that an apple has a core. The notion that the self has a unitary core is
just her metaphorical way of describing the ineffable self as solid, durable,
and real.
And, Leary says that the postmodern self is "revealed to be e m p t y . . , far
from being liberated, [it] is instead enslaved" (1994, p. 454). But the post-
modern self is not empty in the simple concrete sense that a kettle on the
stove can be "empty," and it is not "enslaved" in the simple concrete sense
that Americans once enslaved Africans. Leary is again just creating meta-
phorical pictures as she tries to say somethin 8 that, presumably, she finds
difficult to say in more objective language.
And, Leary complains that, "Deconstructionism delinks language from
the world it is purported to describe" (1994, p. 438)~ But she does not
believe that there are concrete links between language and reality, as there
are links that tie the dog to the tree. This, too, is just a metaphorical way of
portraying her understandin 8 of postmodernism.
But her colorful metaphors portray postmodernism in a misleading way.
Postmodernism believes in a reality beyond words; it just believes that the
world beyond words is understood differently depending on how we agree
to describe it. It gives new emphasis to the importance of looking at the
way we talk about the world.
In fact, postmodernism might be summarized like this: Language matters,
and it matters far more than people have imagined. It does not simply label
reality in an accurate or inaccurate way. It creates metaphorical images of
reality that take us into different kinds of experience. Having different ex-
periences causes us to do things differently, to create different kinds of
institutions and cultures, and lead different kinds of lives. Psychoanalysis
cannot ignore this process without subverting its own clinical purposes. It
cannot become more objective by pretending its theories are not couched
in metaphorical relics that constitute our language.
What does postmodernism have to offer psychoanalysis? It invites an-
alysts to use a new set of concepts to study and observe the psychoanalytic
process. For example, it invites us to consider the way implicit metaphori-
cal imagery weaves its way through our patient's thoughts, to notice the
way patients structure their identities by claiming and rejecting impulses,
and to notice, too, the way a sense of one's history is minimized by the
patient's implicit endorsement of a metaphysics of presence.
And in doing all of this, postmodernism legitimates psychoanalytic dis-
course without requiring it to lay its foundation in the Enlightenment meta-
physics of an empirical science. It invites psychoanalysis to look at what it
is doing successfully without requiring that it reify the Unconscious or any
of its metaphorical concepts. Postmodernism shows psychoanalysis that it
POSTMODERN PSYCHOANALYSIS 391

has become the discipline best equipped to forestall the loss of meaning
from the glare of a metaphysics of presence by inspiring us with the pros-
pect of understanding our present in the light of our nostalgic memory.
But postmodernism awaits the creative work of psychoanalysis to synthe-
size this new thought within a clinical process. There are many paths be-
coming visible here. We are only beginning to explore this new terrain. We
are only just now learning to talk about it. To join in this movement one
need not accept every postmodern statement, or take every path any self-
identified postmodern would suggest. Postmodernism is less an ideology
than a vocabulary with associated insights. You do not lose your mind or
your agency in postmodernity. All you need to do to become a part of the
postmodern venture is learn to speak the language, to notice what it will
point out to you and to share in a conversation we are having about how
to utilize postmodern insights within a psychoanalytic frame.
Of course, those of us beginning on this journey may not convince the
wary to leave their favorite metaphors behind and come along with us, but
we will send back messages like this one, now and then, to reassure the
cautious that our venture into the postmodern wilderness has not resulted
in our falling off the edge of the world.

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