LOUIS A. SASS
103
Many patients are likely to see things rather differently.
It
is, after all,
their lives that are at issue. For them, the sheer weight of certain feelings
- of frustration or grief, ambivalence or fear - may make the view from
these vertiginous Nietzschean heights seem somehow less than relevant.
The brute, undeniable reality of certain memories may make such patients
less attracted to the idea of merely fabricating stories. We might recall that
a narrative , by definition, always refers to events beyond itself. In an
historical narrative, as in psychoanalysis, the events in question are
assumed to have occurred prior to the telling. The idea of concocting
narratives of one's own life, yet not being particularly worried about their
accuracy, or their obsolescence in the face of myriad alternative versions,
may not be consistent with the essence of the narrative impulse itself (at
least as it has existed through most of human history). Certainly there are
many to whom such an enterprise would seem rather futile and self-in–
dulgent. Similar problems apply to the potentially self-congratulatory
skepticism advocated by Richard Geha. To experience life as a sort of
endless labyrinth of interpretation might come to seem rather tedious, if
we know in advance that there is in fact no Ariadne's thread, no hidden
center, nor even a real Minotaur waiting there to challenge us.
So far I have been describing reasons why the postmodernist ap–
proaches to psychoanalysis might fail to be as compelling to patients as
they are to their therapist advocates. Clearly, however, these interpreta–
tions
have
gained a certain currency. One presumes they have had some
impact on the actual conduct of exploratory, interpretive psychotherapy,
although it is not possible to say how broad or deep this influence is. It is
worth considering another dimension, the kind of influence on the pa–
tient or analysand which this stance toward history and interpretation is
likely to have. Obviously, the postmodernist advocates emphasize positive
effects - liberation, invigoration, the development of flexibility and so–
phisticated self-awareness. Yet we cannot ignore other, more unsettling
possibilities. We might look to Nietzsche, for it is he who discerned most
clearly the sources of danger and weakness inherent in these forms of
skepticism and perspectival fluidity which, in his view, were so central to
the dawning modern age. He suggests the potential for confusion or en–
ervation, and for encouraging a kind of self-questioning, even self-canni–
balizing involution as well as a certain narcissism of the mind, phenomena
that certainly play more than a small part in the neuroses, personality dis–
orders, and general miseries of our era.
Nietzsche spoke of a "madly thoughtless fragmentation and fraying of
all foundations, their dissolution into an ever flowing and dispersing
becoming," as among the "remarkable symptoms of our age ." He
believed that new forms of historical and cultural awareness had exposed
