A Selection of
Lois Shawver's Recent Publications
Shawver, L. (2007). Postmodern Pedagogy. In , J. L. & Horn, R. A. Jr. (Eds.). The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology. Greenwood Publishing Group, (454-462).
This chapter begins: "Postmodern pedagogy is about teachers building an educational spaceship. The point of the spaceship is to help students escape the gravitational field of their own disinterest, help them find the motivation and inspiration to invent their own futures in a rapidly changing world, the futuristic world of their maturity, a world that their teachers of today will scarcely recognize." The chapter discusses how some of the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Francois Lyotard can contribute to this postmodern pedagogic vision. |
Shawver, L. (2006). Nostalgic
Postmodernism: Postmodern Therapy
| This book tells the story of therapy's postmodernization, it's shift from an authority based canon of knowledge to fragmented knowledges, then to local knowledges, local therapy skills, and finally conversational reweaving and community reflection. Gradually, nostalgia fades with a dawning of a new vision of how to help clients and each other. |
Shawver, L. (2004) Therapy Theory
after the Postmodern Turn. In David Pare &
Glenn Larner. Collaborative
Practice in Psychology and Therapy (Haworth
Practical Practice in Mental Health)
| Once you get to Amazon through the link
above to Pare and Larner's book, you can
do a search for the Shawver chapter, or
find it in the table of contents.
An explanation of key postmodern concepts for postmodern therapies , including "tiotoling" (talking-in-order-to-listen), generous listening, positional fluidity, and paralogy. |
Shawver, L. (2001). If Wittgenstein and Lyotard Could Talk with Jack and Jill: Towards a Postmodern Family Therapy. Journal of Family Therapy. 23, 232-252.
| An essay and script of an imaginary tea party in
which Wittgenstein and Lyotard, as well as
a number of other postmodern authors, talk
two imaginary family therapy trainees
about their philosophies.
A movie has been made based on this paper, and this movie is available, among other places, at Masterworks. |
Shawver, L. . (2000). Postmodern tools for the clinical impasse. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 28(4). 619-639.
| A study of the relevance of postmodern concept of a "borderzone" for psychoanalysis. The paper is part of an ongoing conversation between the author and Douglas Ingram's work. |
Shawver, L. (2000). My Postmodern
Path to a Critical Psychology. (pp.
184-195). In Tod Sloan. (Ed.) Critical
Psychology : Voices for Change
| Once you get to Amazon through the link
above to Sloan's book, you can do a search
for my chapter if you like, or find it in
the table of contents.
Like other contributors to this volume, my chapter describes the aspects of my personal and scholarly background that help explain my criticism of traditional psychology. |
Shawver, L. (1998c), On the Clinical Relevance of Selected Postmodern Ideas: with a Focus on Lyotard's Concept of "Differend". Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 26(4).
| This paper is probably the one that will be the most relevant to family therapy. It introduces Lyotard's concept of "differend." A differend is a dispute that is based on two people operating within different language-games. Like the prior paper, this paper also explains how Lyotard's concept of paralogy can be useful for the psychotherapist. The paper also explains how paralogy can help us conceptualize postmodern treatment for the differend. |
Shawver, L. (1998b). Postmodernizing the Unconscious. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.58(4), pp. 329-336.
| This paper studies the question of how postmodern Freud was at various times in his writing career and how to enhance the postmodern dimension of psychoanalysis today. It begins by deconstructing the ancient images that hold us conceptually captive according to both Derrida and Wittgenstein. In Derrida this is called our "logocentrism." In Wittgenstein, it is a misleading picture of language that holds us captive in the fly bottle. Then the paper studies a series of Freud's works to discover that he was initally postmodern but became modern in some important ways. The paper ends with an account of Lyotard's concept of "paralogy" as a way of postmodernizing psychoanalysis. Lyotard, by the way, was a Wittgensteinian and the notion of paralogy is related to the Wittgensteinian idea of a language game. |
Shawver, L. (1998a). Lacan's Theory of Self and the Story of the Last Cookie. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis. 8(3), pp. 329-336.
| This is an introductory paper, meaning it should be readable to those with no background in Lacan. It is a short fictional narrative of a child's experiences in developing an Other that is woven heavily with selected quotations from Lacan. I think you'll find the fictional narrative makes Lacan's writing clearer, and it shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis uses the concept of an Other. |
Shawver, L. (1996b). Noticing Metaphor in the Psychoanalytic Session. The American journal of psychoanalysis, 56(4), pp. 460-462.
| A brief discussion of a paper by Douglas Ingram on the role of metaphor in psychoanalysis. |
Shawver, L. (1996a). What Postmodernism Can Do for Psychoanalysis: A Guide to the Postmodern Vision. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 56(4), pp.371-394.
| This article introduces postmodern concepts like "fragmentation," "decentered," "Other," and "dialogic," as well as terms that are more specifically Derridean such as "differAnce," "deconstruction," "logocentrism" and the "metaphysics of presence" and it talks about later Wittgenstein as well as Derrida, Lacan, and Lyotard and relates them all to the notion of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. In psychoanalytic circles this paper has been dubbed the "postmodern primer." |
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