Brief excerpts

Prologue:

Chapter 1: Becoming Postmodern

       For me, at least, when I go to a new city, maps are not enough to dissipate my feeling of geographic disorientation.  What I need is to stretch my legs, to walk the streets, to stroll this way and that, to see the sights and hear the sounds, to breathe the distinctive cultural air of the particular city, to eat its food.  If I do that, then, suddenly, without knowing quite how it happened, I begin to know my way around.
       To help you orient yourself to the new postmodern realm, I invite you to step inside the mind of a fictional postmodern therapist as she walks about and looks around.  Let's call her Val....

Chapter 2: How the West Became Postmodern

       Postmodernism can be thought of as a third stage in the course of Western history (e.g., Ashley, 1997; Kramer, 1997; Graham, 1997).  According to this model, premodernism had existed from prerecorded times until about 1750, when modernism became visible and premodern beliefs were washed away.  Then....

Chapter 3: What is Postmodernism?

       The English painter John Watkins Chapman seems to have invented the term "postmodern" in 1870, about the same time that the telephone and the typewriter were being invented and a decade before the most modern reder could cast an electric light on the book pages she was reading (See Everdell, 1997).
        It was during this period of high modernity that....

Chapter 4: Why Therapy is Becoming Postmodern

         It was in the peak of modernity, about 1900, when the term "psychotherapy" began to be heard.  (Later the term was to be shortned to "therapy.")  From the beginning, therapy was full of spirit and dreams of modernity, and, of course, overly confident.  It seems all the schools of therapy dreamed that eventually science would prove that it was more powerful than all the other schools.
         About this time, the word "psychotherapy" began appearing in the titles of books.  No one doubted that psychotherapy was an exciting new idea, but the term did not mean what it means today....

Epilog

       When I began my private practice thirty-five years ago, people found my name in the phone book and called me asking, "What kind of therapy do you do?"  As I learned, they expected me to say something like, "I do psychoanalysis" or "I do client-centered therapy."  The popular image was that there were certain kinds of therapy, much as there are certain kinds of software, and a wise client shopping for a therapist would determined just which kind of therapy that the therapist did.
       I bought into that model....