Post-Modernism, Baudrillard and Psychotherapists

I am no expert on Jean Baudrillard. I am reading his works and the works of those who were inspired or disgusted by his ever-revised views. I like that about Baudrillard. He reminds me of a website which is frequently updated by different administrators; yet we can always find the older versions of this website in cache. And they will always deliver some wisdom.

I do not want to devote myself to the camp of "post-modernists" (as it's stubbornly done to Baudrillard). I just find Baudrillard's critical approaches to (American)consumerism, technologies and media studies appealing. Yet not scientific. In this respect, Baudrillard reminds me of Freud and his impact on scientific scholarship and arts.

Speaking about Baudrillard and psychotherapy, Questia search engine generated a curious result for me today: the title of the book is "Post-Modernism for Psychotherapists: A Critical Reader". Below is a chunk from the book's Introduction:

The post-modern challenges, and through this, potentially stimulates, in a variety of ways. Crucially, it attacks the 'modernist' ego-centric/person-centred approaches of much psychoanalysis, counselling, psychotherapy and psychology. Post-modern Continental philosophers suggest that we are 'subject to'. For example, for Lacan we are subject to language, for Levinas we are subject to the other and to difference, for Foucault we are subject to power/knowledge relationships, for Derrida we are subject to undecidability and the constant deferral of meaning, for Kristeva we are subject to strange, disruptive and potentially creative forces. In that he insisted that we are subject to the unconscious, Freud himself is a foundational post-modern thinker.
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By reminding us that we are 'subject-to(o)', it can be a challenge to omnipotence, both the patient's and the therapist's, and it can be a plea for humility. It can induce a sense of wonder. It questions whether language and speech are ever neutral or transparent, merely pointing to meanings outside themselves. It can alert us to the fact that language is never static, but always changing, within the culture which language also shapes. It can remind us that our words and gestures are cultural, personal and inter-subjective acts.

In the chapter dedicated to post-modern continental philosophers, Baudrillard was honored with nine pages. Reading the compillation of chunks cropped from Baudrillard's works for psychotherapists was a rewarding experience, in the end. I should do a more extensive research on Baudrillard's views on simulation and the hyperreal. This philosophical framework might turn out as a very big contribution to my class and thesis. I am a bit concerned that my thesis might appear too method-oriented. And we are doing cultural studies here.

IssueCrawler is like calcium for the bones of my research, while Baudrillard's concepts of simulacra and the hyperreal might be a good serving of protein for the body muscle of the paper.

Finally, snack with this quote from Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (1993):

Reality is no longer stranger than fiction: it captures every dream before it can take on the dream effect. A schizophrenic vertigo of serial signs that have no counterfeit, no possible sublimation, and are immanent to their own repetition - who will say where the reality they simulate now lies? They no longer even repress anything (which, if you like, keeps simulation from entering the sphere of psychosis): even the primary processes have been annihilated. The cool universe of digitality absorbs the universe of metaphor and metonymy. The simulation principle dominates the reality principle as well as the pleasure principle.

I will echo this quote with a line from Edgar Allan Poe: "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"