LOUIS A. SASS
97
In psychotherapy this postmodernist trend, as we might call it, is
prevalent across a number of schools and can take a variety of different
forms. The Jungian James Hillman, for example, wishes to view psy–
chotherapy as a creative endeavor, akin to the arts rather than to science
or engineering. Family therapists such as Jay Haley and Paul Watzlawick
have long recognized - and attempted to take advantage of- the ways in
which certain construals of human interaction, even entirely fictional
ones, can have the effect of transforming the ongoing patterns of
interaction themselves. Even some behavior therapists, now emphasizing
their pragmatist rather than positivist heritage, have discovered social
constructionism.
If the trend is most striking among psychoanalysts, perhaps this is be–
cause it is they who traditionally have had the deepest commitment to
certain realist assumptions, concerning both the existence of deeply em–
bedded psychic structures (id, superego, the unconscious, and so on) and
the relevance of memories from early childhood. (The memories may be
of real-world events or of fantasies entertained during infancy and early
childhood; the point is that they concern phenomena assumed to have
occurred in the past.) Some sense of the significance of these assumptions
is conveyed by Mirc;:ea Eliade, who compared the Freudian treatment of
early childhood experiences to traditional mythic conceptions of
momentous, early events occurring in a primordial era of the gods. By
postulating primal happenings of early life, we create a sort of time-out–
of-time, an all-important era of essential occurrences that precede our fall
into history. This has the effect of creating a set of ultimate referents, a
place for our searchings to come to rest, and a way to transform a sense of
arbitrariness into feelings of destiny or fatedness .
In recent years, the influential works of the psychoanalysts Roy
Schafer and Donald Spence, and the less well-known writings of analysts
such as Richard Geha and Serge Viderman, have challenged these realist
assumptions, arguing that psychoanalytic interpretations are less
discoveries than creations and that memories are more invented than
retrieved. In their different ways, all these thinkers emphasize how the
demands for linguistic expressibility and narrative coherence that are
implicit in the largely verbal psychotherapeutic encounter (as well as in
the writing of case histories) tend to impose organization on the raw
material of the patient's experience. They believe that, to a large extent,
this organization is not already implicit in the material, but that this fact
does not hinder such organization from having a profoundly curative
effect. The relativistic tone of so much of this writing is apparent in the
following statement by Roy Schafer: "A version of the past can only be a
narrative about past narratives. And that past toward which we might
adopt a fatalistic attitude is not more than one contemporary historical
