ABSTRACT
Over a long career, Sidney Blatt has not hesitated to confront subtle psychological topics concerning subjective, even evanescent and often unconscious phenomena. His work on psychological representations and self-de®nition, for example, proceeds boldly into such territory. One of the many reasons I have such respect for my old friend Sid is that he has never succumbed to the temptation to try to ®nesse the vexing problems of developing reliable methods for studying them, so that his work can be replicated by others. All too many of our colleagues, psychologists and psychoanalysts alike, invoke instead the trendy cliches of postmodernism, claiming that a new ± and not incidentally, a far less demanding ± methodology is needed to replace that of the true scienti®c tradition. It is then, I hope, ®tting to help celebrate Sid's many contributions by taking a hard and sustained look at postmodernism, and some of the ways it has had unfortunate effects on our ®eld, psychoanalysis in particular.
