What Analysts Really Do: Psychoanalysis as a Nonlinear Dynamic System

ABSTRACT

Of all current psychologies, psychoanalysis is the most engaged with the complex and chaotic dimensions of human development and suffering – intricate psychic processes, fluxing mental and physical states, unexpected shifts between clarity and confusion, big changes following small inputs, uncertainty about causes and locations – including whose thoughts belong to whom, and more. These crucial elements, however, have not always been taken up explicitly. Nonlinear dynamic systems theory (NLDS) provides an aesthetically pleasing and scientifically current framework for these factors and illuminates established clinical practice and theory. Through clinical examples, conceptual elaboration, and an account of the author’s growing interest in this field, this paper offers a user-friendly invitation to NLDS.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonlinear dynamic systems
• complexity
• chaos
• contemporary psychoanalysis
• social psychoanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See for example, Coburn (2014), Galatzer-Levy (2002), Ghent (2002), Gleick (1987), Knight (2023, this volume), Sander (2002), Seligman (2005), Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange (2002).

2. I use quotes to show how these categories themselves suggest a kind of false separation between domains that are inextricable – however useful they might be.

3. Which are, after all, inseparable.

4. Subsequent researchers developed these connections further (e.g., Beebe et al. 2005; Seligman 2018).

5. Erikson’s (1958, 1969) seminal psychobiographies of Luther and Gandhi are among the most remarkable examples (See below). Also see Chodorow (1999) on the strong affinities between psychoanalysis and anthropology.

6. A cogent comparison of these approaches can be found in David Rapaport’s (1959) introduction to Erikson’s first presentation of his identity concept, in the first issue of the ambitious Ego Psychological journal Psychological Issues. For a more extensive discussion of that journal, see Seligman (2018).

7. His translation of the Bible from Latin remains in use today.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Seligman

Stephen Seligman DMH, Clinical Professor at the University of California, San Francisco and at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; author of Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, and Attachment.