ABSTRACT
P ostmodern thought has taught us to approach the history of ideas with a heightened awareness of cultural relativity, the subjectivity of the historian, and the nonlinearity of progress. From the concept of nonlinearity, it is not a huge leap to begin playing with ideas about the reversibility of time, so when I was asked to look at Kohut and Loewald in a historical context, I decided to flash forward rather than backward in history, to take a measure of their contributions. My plan is to discuss selected ideas of Kohut and Loewald, in relation to the writings of a small number of contemporary psychoanalysts, whom I have designated as the postmoderns.
