Postmodern psychology is an approach to psychology that questions whether an ultimate or singular version of truth is actually possible within its field. The postmodern psychology can be defined from two sides, the first, according to which is part of the basic postulates of rupture with the model of a meta-narrative rationalist and integrator of modernity that allows the integration of self or behavior human as a single entity and based on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the “mirror theory” in conjunction with the fragmented self and the vision by means of which the practice of psychology. It is a way of seeing your mind.

It also challenges the modernist view of psychology as the science of the individual, in favour of seeing man as a cultural/communal product, dominated by language rather than by an inner self.

Characteristics
Postmodern psychology relies on using a range of different methodologies rather than a singular approach, to embrace the complexity of reality and avoid oversimplification. Post-modernism challenges a systematic, analytical approach to the understanding of the human psyche, as inherently flawed by the impossibility of taking a detached, ‘objective’ position; and favours instead a transmutable position which may maintain the possibility of taking conceptual hold of a self that is itself decentered.

Some would maintain that the very project of a postmodern psychology is self-contradictory, in the wake of the deconstruction of the unified self – the fading or aphanisis of the subject that psychology is traditionally supposed to investigate.

The postmodern self
From this perspective, the reality of the psyche is such that it can only be seen as a fragmented self or as an image of the other, or in its image in the mirror following the Lacanian postulate according to which the “mirror stage” represented as the moment in which a (or an) infant “recognizes” himself in the image of the mirror or in a similar and close mirror that re-presents him. This idea is also complemented by the proliferation and multiplicity of roles and linguistic meanings of postmodernity for the generation and social and linguistic complementation of the individual in a multicultural entity and with the capacity to assume different linguistically complex roles. Not only unconsciously, but also in the unconscious. Recall that for Lacan the unconscious is structured as a language,

Psychology and the media
The definition of a postmodern psychology must necessarily include the analysis of how the media and how they structure and complement the fragmented self from its formation in childhood. According to Vattimo, we have entered into a scenario, that of postmodernity , where communication and media acquire a central character, although this abundance of continuous issuers does not provide a unitary vision that allows us to form the self with a single vision of the outside world, nor even a contextualized and independent vision. On the contrary, from the postmodern psyche the world of the media only brings as a consequence a greater egoic fragmentation.

Planteo de Vattimo
Continuing with what Vattimo said and our society is increasingly close to being an informative babel that influences the construction of the world view of the subject from its beginnings, on the one hand opens paths to freedom, to plurality, but for the other escapes from the unitary visions of rational-modernity and does not make it possible to integrate the self as a single structure. The subject’s attempts to create a single ego structure based on a single cultural identity fall into failure in the clinical abnormality.

In Clinical Psychology
From this point of view there is no duty to be of the therapist towards the patient but only an understanding of the multiple realities of being that the patient carries with him. Likewise, the temporality of postmodern therapy diverges from the psychoanalytic view in classical psychoanalysis. The stages of childhood define the search for the object of the unconscious in therapy from the postmodern view, whereas the moments of the unconscious can not only appear in childhood but also during the whole life of the subject even. At this point from the postmodern psychoanalytic view in the unconscious it is possible to generate a displacement of the adult subject to his childhood and have traumatic elements at all times of life without detailing a specific stage of traditional Freudian description.

Tetrad and transmodern
Postmodern psychology has also been linked to the Tetrad of Marshall McLuhan: “Tetradic logic” supposedly allowing us to accept knowing without knowing in the context of changingness.

Paul Vitz refers to yet a further development, that of “transmodern” psychology, as a “new mentality that both transcends and transforms modernity … (where) psychology would be the handmaid of philosophy and theology, as from the beginning it was meant to be” – aspiring to cure mental problems through integrated intervention into the human mind and body combined.

Source from Wikipedia