ABSTRACT
Post-modernism questions notions of universality and truth, and this seems to us mandatory, in spite of the accusations of relativism that post-modern thinkers have often had levelled at them. Post-modern questioning can help us be more open to our patients’ truths, to be more alert to how what is true in one moment may not be the next, and to how what is true for one patient may not be for another. Post-modernism raises questions about authorship: to what extent are we authors of our own lives? Psychotherapy has the potential to open us up to the unknown (Levinas), and to the excitement of living, which, perhaps by definition, means giving up the illusion that we can ever be fully in charge of our own destinies. This view could be contrasted with that of therapies with a more modernistic bias, which tacitly or explicitly foster the hope that one can become the person one would like to be (in this connection, see Kierkegaard, on despair at being who one is). The Lacanian notion of getting in touch with one’s desire may sound as if it belongs to this way of thinking; Lacanian desire, however, is about something very different indeed, something which might be extremely disruptive of the destiny one thinks one has chosen for oneself.
