ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with examples of common sense failing to deliver on its implied promise of effective interpretive understanding. Common sense is fundamentally an interpretive sense. Common sense knows in advance the difference between the ancient and the old-fashioned, between what should be preserved and what abandoned. Psychoanalysis, at its strongest moment, remains equally skeptical of aligning itself with either the "ancient" or the "new". Common sense appeals to an impulse toward assimilation. Uncommon psychoanalytic sense appeals to an impulse toward separation and difference. The impulse to conserve the border will necessarily provoke a counter-impulse that names it, pejoratively, "conservative". The willingness to modify will necessarily seem reasonable, even progressive. Post-modern thought about genders and sexualities has achieved the status of common sense. The phrase, "post-modern", has become a fixture of the commonsensical. When modernity turned commonsensical, it spawned, both in and out of psychoanalysis, a host of post-modern disruptive strategies.
