Nonlinear Psychoanalysis: Notes From Forty Years of Chaos and Complexity Theory

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Notes

1 Stewart, I. (1989). Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

2 Briefly, the Lorenz system is a specific nonlinear set of three differential equations in three variables that can be thought of as determining the movement of a particle in three-dimensional space. If one traces the particle along its path, it will orbit around one of two poles but seems to switch from orbiting one to orbiting the other in an unpredictable fashion. Since the equations are deterministic, the starting point of the particle alone governs its entire future behavior, but surprisingly, any infinitesimal variation in that starting point will eventually give rise to an arbitrarily large difference in the particle’s path. This sensitivity to initial conditions is called chaotic behavior.

3 In a footnote to this chapter, Galatzer-Levy recalls an editorial reader who also objected to the elimination of empathy as a necessary condition for analysis, because empathy has been “highly visible” (p. 229) to, if not at the core of, many approaches. He reiterates, “I do not take it as a demonstrated fact that empathy is always a central curative factor…[because of] the absence of a good alternative explanation of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. Nonlinear dynamics provides alternative explanations” (p. 229). It is left to the reader to decide which of these explanations, all admittedly insufficient, is the most satisfactory.