ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two typically reductive critiques of the postmodern turn in psychoanalysis, reductive in that postmodernism is reduced to a single meaning, and thus the complexity of postmodernity is screened from view. Postmodernity and psychoanalysis, in this reading, have absolutely nothing to do with each other, unless it is decided otherwise by the psychoanalytic community at some point when the profession might more actively consider a radical change in its system of beliefs. In contemporary psychoanalysis, in the work of its most radical clinicians and theoreticians, the subjectivity of the self is approached as comprising multivalent psychical forms, embedded in a field of interpersonal relationships, and in close connection with unconscious fantasy. In traditional psychoanalysis, practitioners tended to pride themselves on their knowledge of the unconscious as a distinct psychical system. Psychical life is portrayed as a nonlinear movement of fantasies, containers, introjects representational wrappings, semiotic sensations, envelopes and memories.
