ABSTRACT
In order to delineate the notion of “postmodern” in psychoanalysis, this chapter examines Derrida’s constructivism, Lyotard’s incredulity, Rorty’s pragmatism and Foucault’s relativising of epistemic models in the light of the sophistic position – “Man is the measure of all things” – a position at the root of relativism in psychoanalysis. Based on the argument of the new face of current pathologies, the new psychoanalysis has been steered in the “politically correct” direction of flexibility, of an adjustment of the frame, refusing to make the psychic life of the analysand an “absolute object” – an illusion allegedly upheld by a one-person psychology. What is left of the irreversible incompatibility of the two orders that preside over our psychic life: the repressed unconscious and its chaos, consciousness and its synthetic zeal? Can masochism and self-destructiveness be understood and worked through via the sole mediation of narrative sharing? Is there a way out of self-description and narcissism for analysts who do not place the hallucinatory activity of dreams, of symptoms and the transference at the very heart of their listening and resist the unbinding power of unconscious action?
