ABSTRACT

In writing their versions of structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to epistemology, methodology, language, meaning, truth, blindness, rhetoric, paradox, and power, critical theorists often enter into dialogue with psychoanalysis. They take note of both the bearing of their contributions on psychoanalysis and the uses they have found for interpretive precedents already established by Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts. Although these dialogues vary with the critical theory or anti-theory being espoused and the particular writer espousing it, they all throw into question some or all of these psychoanalytic precedents. Unlike these critical theorists, most clinical psychoanalysts (certainly, most American psychoanalysts) continue to ignore these intellectual developments. To understand this differential of interest it is not enough to make due allowance for the difficulty in the way of the psychoanalyst's combining a substantial amount of clinical practice, reflection on that practice, and psychoanalytic scholarship, with close study of the work of critical theorists. By close study I refer to study of this other vast scholarly output, sufficient to help the psychoanalyst understand these interdisciplinary dialogues and perhaps establish a preferred position of his or her own or even dare to join the conversation more intimately than that. For whatever the practical difficulty, it has never been more urgent for analysts to make these interdisciplinary efforts.