A Warrior's Stance: Commentary on Paper by Terry Marks-Tarlow

Abstract

This commentary highlights specific aspects of a psychoanalytic complexity perspective in considering and discussing Terry Marks-Tarlow's article, “Merging and Emerging: A Nonlinear Portrait of Intersubjectivity During Psychotherapy.” The advantages of a complexity theory sensibility reside in the areas of (a) providing a robust theoretical framework for understanding the sources and phenomenology of complex emotional life and (b) understanding the clinical implications of thinking through a complexity theory lens. The latter involves examining the attitudes that emanate from such a revolutionary perspective and their impact on the therapeutic relationship and on therapeutic action and change. Special emphasis is placed on the distinction between two vital dimensions of psychoanalytic discourse: the phenomenological and the explanatory. This distinction is used as a lens through which the author considers the essential themes of understanding the complexity of the multiple sources of personal lived experience and their concomitant meanings, personal situtatedness (or “thrownness”), emotional responsibility, and personal freedom.

Acknowledgments

I wish to extend my deep gratitude to Nancy VanDerHeide for her keen editorial eye in the preparation of this manuscript.

Notes

¹See Frie and Coburn (2010) for a thorough treatment of this subject.

²For a thorough discussion and expansion of the concept of mirroring vis-à-vis complexity theory, see VanDerHeide (2009).

³Sometimes the realm of the explanatory converges with that of the phenomenological, such that we may directly and consciously experience the embeddedness of our experiential worlds in contexts greater than ourselves (e.g., our culture). Indeed, this is one outcome of therapeutic action. This is not a given, however. Often we may experience ourselves as disengaged, alienated, decontextualized beings as if immune to the effects of the relentless contexts to which we are always subject. And indeed, a “decontextualized self” (if you will excuse the Cartesianism) is one in which the person has been stripped of his awareness of the contextual forces (e.g., social, cultural, historical) that gave rise to his emotional life to begin with and that continue to inform his experiential world (see Maduro, 2008, for a thorough explication of this topic).

⁴This is an example of speaking explanatorily and not necessarily phenomenologically.

⁵This is resonant with Orange's (2001) description of a “kind of double inhabiting” in which “the experiential world seems to be both inhabited by us and inhabiting us” (pp. 297–298).

⁶It is instructive to note here that, drawing from information theory, an additional and separate definition of complexity is incompressibility, such that a complex system cannot be reduced down, or compressed, into an algorithm that is shorter or simpler than the system itself. In that light, the system itself, as it unfolds over time, is its own shortest description.

⁷Herein lies the beauty of what Adam Phillips (1999) referred to as “hinting”—in one sense, a gentle proffering of a point of view in the absence of the analyst's need for the patient to adopt such a point of view. He stated, “Analysis—unlike teaching and seduction—is an education through hinting, about hinting” (p. 109).

⁸The concept of regression, one of the hallmarks of a variety of traditional psychoanalytic perspectives, serves as a glaring instance of the importance of identifying whether one is thinking and speaking phenomenologically or explanatorily: Phenomenologically, we certainly may label a particular dimension of experience as “regression” because of its developmental familiarity or its presumed appearance of decreased organization and immaturity. However, explanatorily speaking, there can never be regression, since all complex systems, despite appearances, necessarily move relentlessly forward in time. In this light, development is defined as the continual (though sometimes gradual) stabilization, destabilization, and restabilization of attractor states (preferred configurations of the constituents of a system). Generally clinicians attribute regression to their patients when something familiar, unwanted, and anxiety-provoking is underway, and the term is not infrequently used in a pejorative manner.