ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between postmodernism, identity and - relatively briefly psychotherapy. It argues that postmodernism makes all identities problematic, and that out of the ensuing chaos emerges a picture of identities as adopted in order to preserve the psyche against the threat of dissolution. The most striking claim relating to the issue of identities to have come from the general postmodernist stable is the following: that identities do not refer to the inside but to the outside. In both psychoanalysis and family systems therapy, there has been a very active response to the agitations of postmodernism. Once therapy forsakes its task of helping to make meaning out of what seems meaningless, it moves into precisely that field of nihilistic 'enjoyment' of the symptom which is warned against by modernists and responsible postmodernists alike. A nihilistic stance like this, which the 'narrative turn' in therapy is too prone to invite, misses what the postmodernist vision has to offer.
