Soft Assembly: Expanding the Field of Therapeutic Actions in (My Training) Analysis

Abstract

The author's project in this article is to wrestle with a paradox—how it happened that she changed while in a training analysis that moved into and, after a fashion, remained in lockdown. Things began to make sense when she happened upon complexity theory. Simultaneously an analysand, a becoming-analyst with her first patient, and a supervisee, she expands the field of therapeutic actions in (her) analysis and illuminates from the inside how therapeutic change is an emergent property of intertwining, interpenetrating, and interacting dynamic systems. She has come to see her growth within this expanded field as a fluid, contingent, and novel process of soft assembly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to express her appreciation to her analyst for her devotion, commitment, and generosity; to Mel Bornstein and the late Teresa Bernardez, her teachers, for their understanding and wisdom; to Suzi Naiburg, her writing coach and editor, for her clear thinking and determination; and to Elizabeth Carr, Nitza Yarom, and Mark Smaller, for their encouragement. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization (2000), Nice, France; the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (2007), Athens, Greece; the International Conference on the Psychology of the Self (2009), Chicago, IL; the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council (2009), East Lansing, MI.

Notes

Carol B. Levin, M.D., is Training, Supervising, and Teaching Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic Council; Associate Faculty, Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute; Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Michigan State University; Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

¹The complex systems theory term “iteration,” used in mathematics and computer science to refer to a new version of a software program, refers, in psychoanalysis, to the present emergence of procedural relational memory. A new iteration of an old experience can herald the possibility of doing something new or more with it, and thus “iteration” isn't identical with the term “repetition” that is more familiar to us. About “emergence,” Galatzer-Levy (2002) writes that the term “refers to situations in which it appears that one gets something for nothing. A phenomenon is emergent when it has significant aspects that are more than the sum of its parts … when something new unexpectedly appears” (p. 708).

² Tronick (1998) wrote that we, as “open biological systems … function to incorporate and integrate increasing amounts of meaningful information into more coherent states … . As more information is integrated, [the system becomes] more complex, while … the increase in coherence results in a more organized state” (p. 295).

³ Tronick (1998) wrote that a patient and an analyst are each a “self-organizing system that creates his or her own states of consciousness, which can be expanded into more coherent and complex states in collaboration with another self-organizing system (p. 292) … . There is a critical and emergent property to an analytic collaboration—the dyadic process—that expands consciousness” (p. 295).

⁴ Tronick (1998) articulated how infants withdraw when the process of essential connected and mutual regulation “[with a primary caregiver] is broken, and they can't repair the [failed] interaction” (p. 292). “Successful reparations and the experience of coordinated states are associated with positive affective states, whereas [unrepaired] interactive errors generate negative [ones]” (p. 294).

⁵I add this phrase to signal my awareness that in writing this account years after it happened, I am not working from a video recording, and a complex present climate colors my selection and organization of memory traces.

⁶The Boston Change Process Study Group (Stern et al., 1998) might see the spring session as holding the possibility for a “now moment.” But my analyst and I were unable to “seize” and “mutually realize” (p. 913) the opportunity and instead cocreated a “failed now moment … [when] something potentially destructive happens to the treatment” (p. 915).

⁷ Goldner (2010) referenced Schore, who (2003a, 2003b, 2011) integrated neuroscientific research on right-brain processes into theory about relational trauma and the therapeutic relationship. He wrote “The right [brain] nonverbally communicates its unconscious states to other right brains that are tuned to receive these communications” (2003b, p. 49) and went on to give credit to Freud for his remarkable and prescient discovery of these processes.

⁸ Stern et al. (1998) wrote: “A basic foundational sense of the therapeutic relationship [can be] put into such serious question that therapy can no longer continue (whether or not [analyst and patient] actually stop)” (p. 915).

⁹ Deutsch (2004) has discussed “conversion” as a process for which both the patient and the analyst have to be ready.

¹⁰I also write about this supervisor, “D,” in an earlier paper (2006).

¹¹In a contemporary reworking of Schafer's (1983) classic text, Coburn (2009) theorizes “psychoanalytic complexity sensibility” as a new “analytic attitude” that plays a key part in “engendering hope, possibility, and potential freedom … that the patient can change and … enjoy a different relationship–life trajectory, [even if she] may not yet be able to envision [its] specifics.”

¹²Thelen and Smith (1994) created the concept of soft assembly to capture the process by which open, dynamic systems assemble into patterns in fluid, contingent ways that are sensitive to time and current conditions: “Problem solving is dynamic [and] solutions are always soft-assembled, and thus are both constrained by the subject's current intrinsic dynamics and potentially derailed by task conditions… . Fluid assembly allows for exploration and for selection of more adapted solutions” (p. 311). Harris (2009) uses the concept for the rich and complex process of the creation of gender identity from the developmental perspective of chaos theory.

¹³To paraphrase Coburn (2002, pp. 661–662), complex systems have many elements that interact dynamically. These interactions are rich (i.e., any constituent can influence and is influenced by many other), nonlinear (i.e., without proportion between cause and effect), and recurrent (i.e., any action can feedback onto itself after a varying number of steps). And complex systems evolve through time and are open in that they interact with their environment.

¹⁴ Galatzer-Levy (2004) believes that the freedom to explore “is a core contributor to development” and that the analyst must create the conditions that make this freedom possible with each unique patient (p. 431).

¹⁵ Chodorow (2010), a sociologist who became an analyst, reorients our present theoretical preoccupation with relational dyadic processes by refocusing on the patient as an individual who is embedded in a complex social world.

¹⁶Oklander (2002) has theorized the analytic dyad as a field, a concept that has been imported into psychoanalysis from physics through the work of the Barangers (1961–1962, translated 2008) and others. He sees the field as “a [dynamic and] experiential configuration that changes in time” (p. 115). Coburn (2000) theorized our field of psychoanalysis as a complex system in its own right.

¹⁷Chaos theory comes from mathematic while nonlinear dynamic systems is the version of the complexity theories that comes to psychoanalysis from biology. As is usual in the analytic literature, I use the terms interchangeably here.

¹⁸ Coburn (2002) thinks that “patterns of experiencing evolve and transform [in the process of] their illumination” (p. 671), that implicit processes that are never brought to lexical awareness also play a crucial part in processes of transformation.

¹⁹We have a rich line of psychoanalytic theory that takes as foundational the human motivation and capacity to grow and that privileges the restarting of derailed development as the core analytic project.