Learning From Distributed Experience: Discussion of Carol Levin's “Soft Assembly: Expanding the Field of Therapeutic Actions in (My Training) Analysis”

Abstract

This article explores and discusses Carol Levin's psychoanalytic journey, her personal struggles and transformations, and her conceptualizations of them through the lens of psychoanalytic complexity theory. It examines the nature of complex relational systems with attention paid to the concepts of system constraint and system freedom. It argues that personal transformation and growth are products and properties of larger, interpenetrating, complex systems in which each of us is relentlessly embedded and that loss and grief are inevitably essential components of personal development in the context of human relational systems. The nonlinearity and dynamism of human experiencing and the meaning making process are emphasized.

Notes

William J. Coburn is Senior Supervising and Training Analyst and faculty member, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology; and Editorial Board, Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He has a private practice in Los Angeles.

¹Here, the term “useful” is left to the analytic dyad to define. Many sustainable changes that can and do emerge are not necessarily “useful” or desirable.

²In complex systems theory, the concept of framing provides an essential tool in understanding the behavior of systems and our relationships to them; that is, by “framing” systems for purposes of exploratory conversations, a given system can be defined as a person, as a dyad, as a group of people, as a larger society, and so forth. There are no standards by which a system is or should be defined. They are “framed” on the basis of the needs and interests of the observer.

³Here the term “explanatory” is used in contrast to “phenomenological,” such that the former pertains to the theories that propose to explain the emergence and presence of the latter. They reside within different dimensions of discourse. Conceptual obfuscation often arises as the result of conflating these two dimensions of discourse.

⁴Hence, philosophy and science. Until recently, our sciences and philosophies have been rather atomistic and reductionistic, and this has shaped, for example, our conceptualizations of “the self” (Taylor, 1989). Historically, our need to know has informed our proclivities toward reductionism, in contrast to our relatively recent hermeneutic, contextualist, and complexity oriented approaches that value uncertainty, perspective, and perpetual seeking with an open mind.