LOUIS A. SASS
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as the critical - or deconstructive - faculties. Here he imagines psycho–
analysis as "an endless interrogation of mind-made worlds that continually
deconstructs- if it chooses to proceed- its antecedents." Geha offers the
model of avant-garde fiction advocated by the postmodernist novelist and
critic Raymond Federman, fiction that will be "the metaphor of its own
narrative progress and will establish itself as it writes itself ... a kind of
writing, a kind of discourse, a kind of reality ... whose shape will be an
interrogation, an endless interrogation of what it is doing while doing it,
an endless denunciation of its own fraudulence, of what IT really is: an
illusion, a fiction, just as life is an illusion, a fiction." For both Schafer and
Geha, we could say that, to a very great extent, what is truly curative in
analysis is the awareness of the analytic process itself, and this amounts to
an awareness of its fundamentally relativist or fictional nature. It is this
which reveals the essentially created nature of
all
of reality, thus liberating
the patient from his rigidities, from the fatedness that comes from taking
too literally what is in fact only the narrative one happens to have been
living by. A progressive subjectivization is apparent in Geha's adoption of
the common deconstructive idea that any creation, such as a narrative, is
fundamentally self-referential - always telling the story of its own creation
in a kind of narcissistic display of the fecundity or freedom of the
narrativizing mind.
This vision of fulfillment through self-knowledge and self-creation
has a powerful appeal, of course. It resonates with some of the deepest
yearnings of the modern mind. And it seems likely that this form of en–
lightenment could indeed be helpful - at least for certain people, with
certain kinds of problems and at certain moments in their development.
Undoubtedly there are many individuals who suffer from rigidities, from
too constraining a conception of themselves or too narrow and impover–
ished a vision of the past. For them, fictionalism and relativism might well
be therapeutic. But what of those who suffer from problems of a different
sort - for example, from feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness, and on–
relatedness; from the inability to form stable relationships; or from a lack
of sustaining interests or continuing goals, values, and ideals? What effect
might the postmodernist vision have on these schizoid, borderline, and
narcissistic problems so characteristic of our age?
What is troubling about the postmodernists is, then, the wholesale
endorsement of aestheticism, relativism, or fictionalism as the truth and
the message of psychotherapy, and their nearly complete failure to con–
sider the dark and troubling side of such views. This suggests a certain
blindness to the existential ambiguities of human life, ambiguities vividly
explored in the modern literary and philosophical tradition from which
these postmodernist ideas actually derive.
