Prologue: Queering and Decolonizing Psychoanalysis

An open matrix of possibilities, gaps, intersections, dissonances, resonances, failures, or excesses of meaning emerges when the constituent elements of someone’s gender and sexuality are not (or cannot be) constrained to monolithic meanings. These are the political, linguistic, epistemological, and figurative adventures and experiences of those of us who like to define ourselves (among many other possibilities) as female and aggressive lesbians, mystical fagots, fantasizers, drag queens and drag kings, clones, leathers, women in suits, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, madwomen, divas, snap!, manly submissive guys, mythomaniacs, transsexuals, wannabes, poofs, truckers, men who define themselves as lesbians sleeping with men […], and all those who are able to love them, learn from them, and identify with them. (Kosofsky-Sedgwick, 1998, p. 115)¹

In these words, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick (1998) attempts to capture the flamboyant inclusiveness of the term “queer.” Weirdness and eccentricity, insult reinvented and transformed into proud self-determination, activism, and political performance: the overarching and historically contingent “Queer” was capitalized, conceptualized, and introduced into the academic world by Teresa De Lauretis (1991) to epitomize the problematization of marginalized subjectivities. In this heterogenous field of “de-subjugated knowledge,”² subjectification or subjectivation – that is, the process of becoming a subject – is understood as a complex interweave of sexuality, gender, class, and race, which encompasses an intersectional perspective that conceives all identity categories as an arsenal of oppressive strategies and subjection techniques to apply prevailing norms. Hence, Q/queer defines the gap from and resistance to the normative regime, thus becoming synonymous with identificatory, disciplinary, and epistemological multiplicity.

This movement of thought that seeks to undermine repressive institutions and traditions by providing jubilant “counter texts” to hegemonic scenarios did not spare psychoanalysis, which was criticized for being an “integral part of the complex technology of social control and of the production of a grammar defining the identities of subaltern groups according to the specific interests and values of a dominant group” (see Minonne’s comment on Ayouch’s article, p. 612). In line with many other feminist and queer theorists, Paul B. Preciado (2019) argued that metapsychology constitutes a colonial and capitalist “techno-patriarchal” construction,³ fostering an understanding of humanity based on the universalization of experiences specific to the white European bourgeoisie of the 20th century. As a consequence, alternative sex, gender, class, and race subjectivations remained unvoiced and invisible, which contributed to the traumatic reiteration and generational transmission of hierarchical norms.

To fully grasp Preciado’s argument, let us bear in mind that colonialism introduced the universal classification of populations in terms of the notion of “race,” which replaced relations of socioeconomic superiority and inferiority established through domination in Eurocentric capitalism⁴ with naturalized understandings of discrimination (Quijano, 2007). At the same time, European white settlers imported into a precolonial world that tolerated and even encouraged non-gendered, gynecratic, or egalitarian elements a rigid system of a biologically determined sexual dimorphism governed by male supremacy (Allen, 1986; Oyewùmi, 1997). So the “coloniality of power” does not just refer to racial classification or its euphemistic distinction of skin color (Quijano, 2007). It further constitutes a “coloniality of gender” or a “heterosexualist” system in which women are defined by their subordinate relation to men, and in which homosexuality or transgender identities are disregarded (Lugones, 2007). Overall, coloniality:

is an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the axes of the system of power and as such it permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/intersubjectivity and the production of knowledge from within these intersubjective relations. (Lugones, 2007, p. 191, emphasis added)

In this sense, coloniality is not a mere military, political, and economic enterprise but also a discursive and conceptual project (Mbembé, 2006). Hence, the unmarked majoritarian perspective of psychoanalysis – heterosexual and Eurocentric – is likened to a colonial epistemological violence that subjugates, ostracizes, and erases all otherness.

The paramountcy of discursivity and the ability of concepts to induce clinical, social, and political effects through language performativity should be emphasized. Let us recall Monique Wittig’s aphorism (2001): “This power of science or theory to act on us materially is not abstract, even though its discourse is. It is just one of the forms of domination.” I will juxtapose this statement made by a radical queer theorist with the recent announcement of a mainstream institution par excellence. To mark the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York (2019), the American Psychoanalytical Association (APSA) apologized for its past views that pathologized homosexuality and transgender identities, leading to “traumatic and harmful methods aiming to ‘cure’” nonconforming desires and identifications and contributing to “widespread discrimination and prejudice in housing, employment, healthcare, and society at large.”⁵ Nevertheless, we are still waiting for the apologies of French psychoanalysts to homosexuals and, trans people who, especially the latter, are even nowadays categorized, pathologized, and discriminated using “diagnostic insults” (Ayouch, 2015) in a psychoanalytical connivance with male biopower and phallic norms.

In France, criticisms regarding the clinical and theoretical mistreatment of the LGBTQIA+ population have arisen in recent years whenever the structure of kinship in French law evolved beyond the traditional heterosexual nuclear family model. Certain psychoanalysts confounded the power of transference with a position of social authority, publicly denouncing the danger of homosexual “cloning” (Korff-Sausse, 1999), the risks of psychosis, the civilization collapse, and even the very disappearance of language (Aràn & Augusto Peixoto, 2010; Croix, 2017). Such oracular and alarmist utterances cropped up at various points over the years in the debates surrounding the establishment of civil unions in 1999, the gay marriage promulgated in 2013, the simplified procedure to modify gender designation on civil status in 2017, and the extension of assisted reproduction to all women in 2019. Ironically, psychoanalysis, which had revolutionized the modern era by effacing the distinction between the normal and the pathological and by emphasizing infantile sexual polymorphism, was virulently accused – not only by feminist and queer scholars or activists but also by eminent insiders – of obsolete “paternal dogmas” (Tort, 2005), sacralized “ideological burqas” (Martens, 2018), “heterosexualism” (Besnard-Santini, 2017), dated familism, and a general inability to keep up with social progress (Heenen-Wolff, 2017).

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Having thus outlined the context underlying the issues addressed in the following pages, I would like to quote Jean-Paul Rocchi’s conclusive statement about the exclusionary practices of the Freudian discipline and the normativity resulting from the insidious infiltration of metapsychological concepts by historically determined sociocultural ideals:

A psychoanalysis free from heterocentrism and from the axiology of difference and identity remains to be developed. A queer subjectivity, under the sign of the odd and varied, that disrupts these binaries where the subject atrophies and reinvents the analytical view of subjectification. (2003, p. 387)

In line with the above incitement, the French-based authors of this special issue have set the objective to queer and decolonize psychoanalysis by restoring its intrinsically subversive character, which has ineluctably been compromised by its historical situatedness and institutionalization. They will seek to reconceptualize a few established psychoanalytical “truths” such as universalized Oedipality, endogenous castration, the essentialized link between penis envy and femininity, solipsistic drives, and the paramountcy of sexual difference. In this manner, they will promote a metapsychology that is divorced from antiquated dogmas, clinically traumatizing constructions, and socially deleterious premises. The contributors will propose “overinclusive models” (Benjamin, 1995) emancipated from developmental idealism and axiological reasoning to consider the infinite diversity of subjectivities and embrace the unpredictable multidetermininsm of the unconscious, which leaves space for freedom, individual choice, and transferential mobility, and thus fundamentally differs from causal linear logic.⁶ More specifically, this issue endeavors to dissuade analysts from relying on pathologizing, etiological, categorical, and hegemonic thinking, instead encouraging them to enhance their awareness of the socially and culturally “contaminated tools” with which they/we cure (Harris, 2005). The overall goal is to illustrate that the study of the unconscious is perpetually open to revision, as Freud (1926) famously stated, and perfectly compatible with contemporaneity.

This perspective, which struggles against transcendental signifiers and ontological significations, accords with the perception of theories as living transformable entities and nomadic creatures:

Think of concepts and ideas not as codifications or properties for which the user has to pay taxes or other kinds of loyalties, but rather as mobile sites of energy. Nomadic theory is a critique of the center as the defining force of a concept and its meanings. It seeks to destabilize the margins and the center. Surely Freud is one of our original nomads, and psychoanalysis is an appeal from the margins of the thinkable. (Harris, 2017, p. 896)

Nomadic concepts go hand in hand with the nomadic subject, namely the permanent reshaping of subjectivity, brilliantly captured by Jean Laplanche with his theory of the endless detranslations and retranslations of enigmatic signifiers under the sway of afterwardness (see Evzonas’s article) and by Deleuze and Guattari (1980) with the notion of “becoming”: the unfolding of difference and multiplicity over time, as fluid movements of creativity that subvert the identities assigned and essentialized by white, bourgeois, masculinist, and heterosexist norms.

This perpetual deterritorialization, as the common thread of Laplanche’s afterwardness and Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming, recalls the nomadic otherness hostile to all roots and anchors that was described by the feminist Rosi Braidotti (2011). The nomad evokes the idea of a wanderer who roams from one place to another without a predetermined destination. What distinguishes them from the migrant who travels from point A to point B with a well-defined purpose is the importance accorded to the voyage instead of the destination. For the nomad, each stopover of the journey is what matters. More precisely, the political fiction of the nomad conceived by Braidotti breaks away from the dominant male viewpoint, avoiding its excluding structures and reconceiving the subject without dualistic oppositions by connecting the body and the mind through a series of transitions, links, and relationships. This project implies renouncing the illusion of a real self, incessantly pushing the boundaries of the ego, and dilating subjectivity through experiential expansion. This brings to mind the rhizome, the subterranean plant stem described by Deleuze and Guattari (1980), which, unlike a vertically anchored tree that symbolizes hierarchical connections, grows horizontally and splits into multidirectional branches and twigs as metaphor of a non-axiological multiplicity.

Like an object of scientific knowledge – and this is the underlying thread of the current issue – the subject of the unconscious may be conceived in terms of a process, becoming, nomadism, or the rhizomatic experience, as a narrative that is constantly written and rewritten in an ongoing and permanent relationship to the other. This dynamic conception opens up novel perspectives on gender and sexual diversity that are impossible to reduce to binary oppositions between men and women, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, cisgender/transgender, and so on. The non-unitary subject, the subject of multiple belongings, becomes energetically queer, thus following the destiny of the drive that was inaugurally “queerized” by Freud (1905) in his first edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, before degenerating into developmental stages marked by the primacy of genitality in the later editions (Van Haute & Westerink, 2016). The idea implicitly shared by the authors of this collection is that of a primary queer sexuality, secondarily transformed into a psychic bisexuality and even into a less inclusive heterosexuality through the introjection of powerful norms.

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What are the strategies for queering and decolonizing psychoanalysis? What are the methods used by the authors of this issue to break the dominant epistemological frames and deconstruct the colonialist logic within the social scientific gaze?

It is important to note here that all contributors are psychoanalysts or psychodynamic therapists working in institutions and/or private practice: their project is thus quintessentially clinical. This is overtly expressed in the articles dealing with the “untranslatable” in the patient’s speech (Hatem), the analyst’s dilemma of neutrality or disclosure (Santos), and the erotic countertransference likely to disrupt treatment or even culminate in boundary violations (Saketopoulou). Notwithstanding, even when the articles do not explicitly refer to material brought by the patients, the authors’ conceptual project is constantly nourished by their diversified experiences in the consulting room with analysands identifying as homosexual, transgender, queer, non-binary, racialized immigrants, sex workers, or other marginalized populations. The main concern of the contributors is to broaden their own listening, make their stance more flexible and less parasitized by their demonic infantile sexual, and decolonize the transference from culturally biased interpretations that are likely to traumatically reiterate in the analytic space the systemic violence endured by some analysands in their social environment.

Given the authors’ psychodynamic training and work, the critical discussion of psychoanalysis in this issue will take place from an insider’s perspective. Seminal metapsychological concepts related to gender and sexuality will be revisited from within by using psychoanalytical thinking to deconstruct and reinterpret psychoanalytical sources. In addition to Freud, the authors will draw primarily on French metapsychology (Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Wladimir Granoff, Christophe Dejours, Monique David-Menard, Jean Allouch) and secondarily on contemporary North American psychoanalysts (Adrienne Harris, Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner, Ruth Stein, Ken Corbett, Lynne Layton, Dominique Scarfone) to accomplish what it may be termed as “intradisciplinary critic.”

While criticizing from within is crucial, the overarching assumption of the articles is that the perspective of indigenous knowledge is insufficient and ineluctably partial. And by indigenous, I do not only mean geographical and cultural but also disciplinary. The use of concepts from diverse linguistic psychoanalytical traditions is extremely beneficial for the expansion of our clinical vision despite the intrinsic limits of translatability. However, the nomadic subject of the unconscious imposes an interdisciplinary approach and “border thinking,” that is, thinking at the very borders, if not outside, of the colonial matrix of power and hegemonic discursive processes (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006).

In their own ways, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs, to quote the pioneers, as well as Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, and Julia Kristeva from the French milieu, highlighted the necessity for the analyst to collect material beyond the psychoanalytical couch and gave brilliant examples of epistemological “dialogism” (Bakhtin, 1984), tacitly derived from the polyphonic approach of truth in the Platonic dialogs. In North American psychoanalysis and, more specifically, in the field of gender, which constitutes one of the primordial “attractors”⁷ of this issue, Adrienne Harris (2005) impressively marries gender studies with chaos theory, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, attachment theory, and psychoanalytical relational perspectives, in order to show “how mind, gender and language emerge in various contexts and are neither solely social and interactional processes nor reified into simply endogenous experiences but […] are historical, social, biological and intrapsychic processes [which] are always interacting, overlapping open systems” (Harris, 2005, p. 3). Similarly, in the Latin American context, Letitia Glocer Fiorini (2017) engages in an exemplary interdisciplinary debate on sexual difference that advances an expanded metapsychological conception of difference(s):

This methodology comprises work at the intersections, on the frontiers, at the limits, which enables us to develop and extend its comprehension presented as substantial categories when they are frozen at the center of the theories. […] Our proposal is not only to identify theoretical limitations, blind spots, and ideological objections, but to open up other forms and logics in order to think about difference. […] The paradigm of complexity enables to develop the type of thinking that accepts heterogeneity and does not always reach dialectical syntheses; is not limited to binary polarities; is based on disjunctive conjunctions and propounds interplay between the instituted and the instituting. This proposal open possibilities to investigate meta-theories supporting the notion of sexual difference. (Glocer Fiorini, 2017, p. XXII)

Interdisciplinarity obviously contributes to the de-essentialization of theory and the denormativation of clinical practice. It is ultimately the logical consequence of a fundamental ethical dimension: the complex human being does not tolerate being confined in a solipsistic disciplinary closure, since all scientific fields, including psychoanalysis, are tempted by the totalitarianism of truth, described by Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor (2017) as the “arrogance of the specialized knowledge indefinitely locked into its own narcissistic excessiveness” (p. 203). Thus, the opening up of psychoanalysis to the humanities, social sciences, and other discourses is a necessary limit to the clinician’s temptation to psychologize multidimensional phenomena or becomings like gender and sexuality, and pathologize whatever does not fit into the master trope. To borrow another metaphor by de Mijolla-Mellor (2017), interdisciplinarity undermines the dogmatism and intolerance of insular (meta)psychological “monotheism,” just as “polytheism dilutes authority between plural divinities” (p. 144).

Gender and queer studies on the one hand and postcolonial and decolonial studies on the other are the extraterritorial paths that the authors of this issue have privileged in order to challenge the autocratic realm of drives and the imperialism of individual psychic reality defended by canonical psychoanalysis in France. Cinematographic, literary, and self-fictional narratives also constitute alternative “clinical” material. Let me repeat that these extra-psychoanalytic discourses are not mere epistemological paradigms or intellectual gymnastics. They are attempts to embrace the variations encountered in our everyday clinical work, which can no longer be contained in traditional metapsychological theories that stress a master theme.

Despite their inclusive appellation that fails to take into account the diverse and even divergent positions of feminist, gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and intersex theorists, gender and queer studies are currently burgeoning fields in France, unlike in the US where they are now situated in the phase of “afterness” and “intro-retrospection” (Berger, 2013). The intrinsically opposing knowledge of these disciplines, which breaks the tradition of the dominant heterosexual male gaze, will be deployed by the contributors of this issue to question the biologically determined hegemonic representations of sexuality and gender identity, and their patriarchal bias. Moreover, in line with psychoanalysis, they will highlight the internalization of social hierarchies and power rhetorics with their dichotomies of masculine/feminine, dominant/submissive, normal/perverse.

Like gender and queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies establish a diverse array of intellectual spaces for subaltern groups to speak for themselves in their own voices, thus balancing the asymmetrical binary power relationship of “us-and-them,” situated in this case between the colonist and the colonized subject. Despite thriving on the analyses of French (or French-speaking) thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Franz Fanon, these alternative narratives of the colonial discourse are now present in Africa, India, Great Britain, Australia, and the US but are underrepresented in France, as if “the contemporary French reflection can no longer speak of the other, let alone to the other” (Mbembé, 2006, p. 140).

Postcolonial and decolonial theory will support the authors’ effort in this issue to challenge the Eurocentric perspective of psychoanalysis and its acritical use of Western categories to describe the sexual experiences of peoples from other geographical areas (see Ayouch’s article). In conjunction with gender and queer studies, the decolonial counter-rhetoric will also highlight the intersections of sexuality, gender, class, and race that are routinely obscured in psychoanalysis. Accordingly, they will promote an awareness of the specific vulnerabilities of subaltern groups, which only become visible when perceived through an intersectional lens. Imagine an emigrant transgender bisexual woman of color who is also a sex worker: the risk of being bashed or even murdered is indisputably higher (Namaste, 2000), and this terrifying reality cannot be ignored in the name of a distorted notion of psychic reality. Intersectionality, by emphasizing the variety of identity categories, is useful insofar as it denies gender as an absolute identity marker and similarly relativizes the overrated notion of sexual difference. While no analyst can dispute the importance of alterity, reducing the variety of differential features to the visible anatomical difference alone implies an epistemological blinding against a background of ideology.

Ensuing from gender and queer theory as well as postcolonial and decolonial studies is historicization, which is an essential prerequisite for critical reflexivity. Michel De Certeau (1986) writes:

Where psychoanalysis ‘forgets’ its own historicity, that is, its internal relationship to conflicts of power and place, it becomes a mechanism of drives, a dogmatism of discourse, or a gnosis of symbols. (p. 98)

Historicization, which Foucault (1969) conceives as a special epistemology that he terms “archeology of knowledge,” is paramount, since it entails awareness of the situatedness of ideas, concepts, institutions, and disciplines, thus warding off dogmas, ideologies, and the illusion of universalist and immutable theoretical axioms (see Laufer’s article). For instance, psychoanalysts who remain irremediably embedded in the master signifier of sexual difference would certainly benefit from Thomas Laqueur’s (1990) work illustrating that the emergence of this core notion in the Freudian corpus is historically inscribed in the socio-epistemological shift that occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, moving from the one-sex model that had prevailed since Greek antiquity in which women were understood as inverted males to the two-sex model in which men and women were seen as polar opposites, thus advocating the latter’s physical and mental unsuitability to occupy the newly created bourgeois public sphere and legitimating as “natural” the real world of male domination. Would it not be consequential to realize that psychoanalysis took the notions of “homosexuality” and “perversion” from psychiatry and sexology with no acknowledgment of the historical specificity and regulatory role of these categories? Or that “doxa delimits the field of phenomena treated by the episteme and that social ethics indicate the field of perverse behavior” (Lantéri-Laura, 1979, p. 67)? Or that psychiatric and subsequent psychoanalytic discourse was presupposed in the case of “perversion,” “homosexuality,” and “transsexuality” a social sample of behaviors but that it “masked both the very process of sampling and the social ethical reasons that determined its particularities” (Lantéri-Laura, 1979, p. 68)? In a nutshell, historicization and hybrid thinking can dismantle the functional terms, categories, and introjects through which colonialist biopolitics operate.

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As this special issue from France aims to queer and decolonize psychoanalysis and thus promote an overinclusive, non-hegemonic, and non-axiological way of thinking about sexualities, gender, class, and, race, it will be able to provide a vector toward a future that is more compatible with justice given the performative power of scientific discourse and its social effects. As Aizura et al. summarize:

a future in which varieties of [subjectivities] that trouble and contest the “total form” of the privileged Western [subjectivity] can each find, not the “completion” and “domination” foreclosed to them through their exclusion from a normative ideal but, rather, new strategies for ethical and political engagement with others and environs. (Aizura et al., 2014, p. 13)

Accordingly, the authors do not hesitate to challenge the sacrosanct ideal of neutrality and the apolitical positionality of mainstream psychoanalysis, which often conceals a complacency with dominant ideologies. If we further consider that all contributors are bilingual or multilingual and that four of them practice psychoanalysis in France despite originating from other geographical areas and disciplinary backgrounds, we may appreciate that their clinical, epistemological, and political project is enhanced by their own lived experience of decentering and border thinking. Hence, their viewpoint appears to be that of privileged “outsiders within,” which can be contrasted with the unspecified transcendental gaze of supposedly value-neutral psychoanalytical research.

As a coeditor of this collection of articles, I am deeply conscious of the challenges posed by this broader debate with regard to the authors’ choice to present their work in English and, more specifically, in a US-based journal. We are well aware that the US emerged from white settler colonialism, and since the 19th century, it has embarked on neocolonial adventures of its own (Aizura et al., 2014). Accordingly, with an English-speaking subject targeting the world, it is impossible to avoid the inescapable frame of coloniality that this issue avowedly seeks to resist. Let us also recall that the authors’ primary scientific vehicle of expression is French, a language that bears a heavy colonial history. Notwithstanding, there are certain limits that need to be acknowledged and accepted, even grieved, like the untranslatable residues of speech, symptoms, and analytic treatments, which are delineated by Nizar Hatem in this issue, or the relinquishment of our more than frequent sexual feelings toward our patients that can only be surmounted with the support of the psychoanalytic community, as suggested by Avgi Saketopoulou. I hope that the discussions aroused and critiques advanced in the following pages can contribute to the broader queer and decolonial project raging far beyond the reach of this issue.

Nicolas Evzonas, Ph.D.

Issue Editor

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the authors who contributed to this collection of papers, especially Thamy Ayouch who shared the responsibility of the edition with me. My gratitude also goes to Allen Siegel for suggesting the publication of my own issue, to Joe Lichtenberg for his interest in a French-based issue, and to Melvin Bornstein for his encouragements during the drafting of the papers. Special thanks goes to Giovanni Minonne for extensively prefacing each author’s work and thus making our French way of thinking more accessible to the Anglo-Saxon readership.

Notes

¹ All English translations of French texts are mine.

² This expression by Susan Stryker (2006) refers to the institutionalization of transgender studies, an independent academic field preceded by queer studies. It is inspired by Michel Foucault (1969) who in his Archeology of Knowledge excavates elements of “subjugated knowledge,” knowledge that has no place or that has been restrained (in the clinic or prison) by dominant and standard forms of knowledge sanctioned by the established history of ideas.

³ In Preciado’s work, “techno-(logical)” is understood in a broad sense, ranging from writing technologies to biochemical and image production.

⁴ Eurocentrism refers to the cognitive perspective of the Eurocentric world, notably all those educated under the hegemony of world capitalism.

⁵ https://apsa.org/content/news-apsaa-issues-overdue-apology-lgbtq-community.

⁶ Dominique Scarfone (2019, p. 37) draws our attention to the difference between causality and unconscious determinism: “The latter is undeniable, but, contrary to the idea of causality, it leaves a margin of indeterminacy in which contingent, even random factors also play a role, and these can only be discussed after the event. In short, the earth’s force of gravity determines the collapse of a bridge, but it is not the cause, unlike the contingent explosion of dynamite that breaks its pillars. This is good news for the individual. This means that as the receiver of the gender message, he or she has the freedom of translation/repression in most cases.”

⁷ Inspired by chaos theory, Harris (2005, p. 85) defines attractors as “points of convergence without being exactly points of gravity and not structures as much as dynamic patterns, sometimes regular, sometimes bimodal and sometimes fractal and strange. Attractors can be defined as those fixed points in the stream of behavior, but fixed points that are nonetheless dynamic and potentially susceptible to transformation. Attractors can be modeled as deeply troughed or rigid pattern forms or as rather fluid assemblies that mutate and reassemble in new and distinct configurations. This concept identifies the unique ways that individual experience is unfolding and self-organizing, changing through multidimensional phase spaces and moving along multiple time scales.”