Review by Lynn Hoffman
of "Nostalgic Postmodernism" by Lois Shawver

A New Paradigm Shift
June 5, 2006

I first ran into Lois Shawver through an online conversation about postmodernism in family therapy. She was talking about the cultural/intellectual stages that Western thought has passed through before coming to that paradigm shift. I was so excited to find a kindred soul outside my small corner of family therapy that I put my hand down through the computer and grabbed her. At least it felt that way. And she swarmed up to the surface to join me, and we haven't stopped talking since.

Shawver's slim but important book is the first of a projected trilogy that describes the main features of postmodernism and traces its implications for clinical work. This installment is called "Nostalgic Postmodernism." It deals with the mix of disillusion and hope that people often feel before an accepted "thought culture" - in this case modernism - dissolves and a new one takes shape. Shawver writes with a crystalline clarity and focus that is unusual for a psychologist, and takes langage seriously; her section on the evolution of the word "postmodern" was masterful. Psychotherapy is another word that gets lost in the mists of time; I was amazed to learn that its first task, in the early 1900s, was to provide mental easement to physically ill people.

Shawver has been an outsider researcher and psychologist for many years. Early on, she took a jarring but electrifying leap into the dark through her discovery of the seminal thinking of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Under his influence, she became distrustful of the premises of scientific modernism, which threatens to commodify and strangle the creative spirit of the field she loves so well. In the case of academic psychology, she is particularly well equipped to challenge its science-related claims, from the development of norms supposedly verified by psychological testing, to "evidenced-based" models for clinical research.

I have many reasons for admiring Shawver's work, but the most encompassing is that although we came from different disciplines and took different paths, we find ourselves now at the same crossing. My image for this, which I have used in writing about therapy before, is the one about the sand tunnels children dig at the beach, and that miraculous moment when the sand crumbles and the sets of fingers touch. This analogy also applies to Shawver's ideas about how to deal with the present uncertain moment when, as the revolutionary writer Antonio Gramsci put it, the old is dying and the new is not yet born. In the work of another postmodern thinker, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Shawver finds a model for a different kind of dialogue, which he called "paralogical." A conversation based on this idea holds different views in parallel, without having to come to any choice. All voices are welcome, as there is no metanarrative to which all must conform. Finally, since the status due to degree or discipline no longer reigns, there is a horizontal leveling.

Shawver's method is where her mouth is, in the form of a totally original online conversation she has called a Postmodern Therapies List. Participants are all in some version of the therapy business, but advanced researchers are also welcome. Some take part actively, others just read and observe, but several thousand persons are involved at any one time. The talk ranges from semi-formal "seminars" covering various philosophers, to shared reactions to public issues, to exchanges about therapeutic dilemmas. Periodically, Shawver takes out streamers from this river of talk and publishes them in the form of an online news letter: Postmodern Therapy News.

Shawver also directs an online course in Professional Development for Massey University's Discursive Therapies program, using members of PMTH as co-teachers and swatches of PMTH conversation as the content for the course. So I am not just talking about a new book here, but about a living confluence of talking, reading, writing and listening, going on in many different ways at the same time. "Nostalgic Postmodernism" is one part of that, and two more installments, called "Visionary Postmodernism" and "Clinical Postmodernism" are also in the pipeline. This review is to welcome that written-down element, and to publish my own appreciation for all that it represents. Much has been made of the Renaissance Man, but Shawver is certainly in the running to become his female counterpart.

Lynn Hoffman, author of
Foundations of Family Therapy: A Conceptual Framework for Systems Change
Family Therapy: An Intimate History
and many other books