Freud and psychoanalysis: Into the 21(st) century

Freud's psychoanalysis has been criticized as quintessentially "twentieth-c entury," reflecting a Zeitgeist of scientism, authoritarianism, and moderni sm that is being challenged and transformed as we enter the twenty-first ce ntury. Yet embedded within the modernist twentieth-century Freud can be fou nd a more radical twenty-first-century Freud, whose greatest contribution, psychoanalysis itself-a way of thinking about our ways of thinking and bein g-endures. In its relentless attention to the analytic process-to that whic h is left out of any discourse, even its own-Freud's psychoanalysis ultimat ely undermines all concrete valuations of authority and knowledge. In this it fits well with postmodernist notions such as perspectivism, deconstructi on, and gender theory. To some extent, it is this twenty-first-century Freu d hidden within the twentieth-century one who prepared the way for the read ings that inform the postmodern era. Freud's concepts of drive and gender a re examined here to illustrate a process within his writings that Casey (19 90) termed "auto-deconstructive." In it, theoretical positions, once assert ed, are progressively undermined and subverted, leading not to a progressio n of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but rather to the evolution of mult iple vectors of thought and language, which arise, disappear, and reappear transformed, progressively expanding our understanding of how we think and the terrain of what can be thought.