postmodernism and what does it have to do with therapy, anyway?
An interview with Lois Shawver
Maybe, like thousands of other therapists, you have heard of and even read what are considered core postmodern therapy texts. And maybe you still struggle to put into a neat sentence your understanding of what it's all about. But, being tongue-tied on the matter could be more a function of the difficulty postmodernists themselves have in clearly defining what they're about than your ignorance. In this exclusive interview, Lois Shawver, the owner of the highly active Postmodern Therapies Homepage (www.california.com/~rathbone/pmth.htm), makes sense of what postmodernism is about and what it means for therapy.
What is postmodernism?
Postmodernism is the new philosophy for the skeptical. Postmoderns are those people who have begun to doubt the authors who seemed to have all the answers, the authors who seem to have everything wrapped up with a complete story of how things are and how they should be. There are many people who are postmodern today but don't know it. The postmodern therapist is the one who looks at all the schools of psychotherapy, from psychoanalysis to behavior theory to family therapy and says, "They talk like they have everything figured out but I don't believe it. They are just too confident. I can think of too many exceptions. I don't have everything figured out either, of course, but I trust my ability to read the issues sensitively and notice the exceptions more than I trust some famous innovator to tell me how things are and how I should do therapy."
Is postmodernism just another word for skepticism then?
Yes, except that it is also various philosophies that ponder our situation as postmodern skeptics.