The edge of chaos: A nonlinear view of psychoanalytic technique.

The field of nonlinear dynamics (or chaos theory) provides ways to expand concepts of psychoanalytic process that have implications for the technique of psychoanalysis. This paper describes how concepts of "the edge of chaos," emergence, attractors, and coupled oscillators can help shape analytic technique resulting in an approach to doing analysis which is at the same time freer and more firmly based in an enlarged understanding of the ways in which psychoanalysis works than some current recommendation about technique. Illustrations from a lengthy analysis of an analysand with obsessive-compulsive disorder show this approach in action.

Women and Children Last: Reflections on the History of Child Psychoanalysis.

From the very first efforts to analyze children and adolescents to the present day, child and adolescent analysis has been denigrated in the analytic community. It has been viewed as "women's work" and regarded as clinically inferior to the analysis of adults. It has been seen as less important for understanding the psyche and in the training of psychoanalysts.

A Nonlinear Lens on Berta Bornstein's "Frankie".

This reading of Berta Bornstein's case of "Frankie" half a century after its publication focuses on the knowing attitude that pervades her description of child analysis and child development, and this attitude is used to explain interventions that appear harsh and anti-analytic to today's reader. Using concepts from nonlinear dynamic systems theory and, particularly, network theory help to both understand what is troubling in the case description and how these problematic features came to be part of the case description. The mistaken view that development is linear leads to attempts to get development "on track" and a view that the goal of analysis is well-defined psychological maturity, as opposed to the ongoing freedom to explore the psychological world in new and creative ways.

The historical moment in the analysis of gay men.

The meanings of men's same-sex desire have changed rapidly in the last fifty years. As a result it is common that patients and analysts (or psychotherapists) have dissonant implicit understandings of the significance of this desire. This dissonance can have untoward clinical consequences, some of which are explored here, and may be partly mitigated to facilitate better analytic and psychotherapeutic work with gay men.

Good vibrations: analytic process as coupled oscillations.

This paper develops a new model for the action of psychoanalysis based on concepts from non-linear dynamics (chaos theory and complexity theory). It shows that the analyst-analysand couple may be conceptualized as a new configuration with its own properties that promote complex development in both members of the couple. These developments are an emergent result of the formation of the analyst-analysand couple and are significantly independent of the particular content of the manifest interaction of the couple.

August Aichhorn: a different vision of psychoanalysis, children, and society.

Though August Aichhorn, in name, remains a significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis, his ideas have been all but abandoned in the modern clinical conception of the treatment of children and adolescents who act out. The current treatment of children and adolescents, so disturbed that their behavior demands treatment outside of their home environment, is currently rudderless and highly dependent on broad societal counter-transferential reactions to disturbed youth. We argue that not only does Aichhorn hold a distinguished position in the history of the treatment of youngsters, but that his ideas about the meaning of severely disruptive behavior as well as the techniques which align with those theories remain relevant and, if utilized, would improve the treatment of severely disturbed youth.

The revolution in psychiatric diagnosis: problems at the foundations.

The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III; 1974) not only revolutionized psychiatric diagnosis, it transformed and dominated American psychiatry. The nosology of psychiatry had been conceptually confusing, difficult to apply, and bound to widely questioned theories. Psychiatry and clinical psychology had been struggling with their scientific status.

The death of the analyst: patients whose previous analyst died while they were in treatment.

A few heroic analysts have described their work in the face of life-threatening illness. However, there are only limited descriptions of these illnesses and deaths from the patient's point of view. Experiences of less heroic colleagues are almost unavailable.

Chaotic possibilities: toward a new model of development.

Most psychoanalytic models of development and change assume an orderly, sequential and predetermined unfolding of psychological functions and structures. Interferences with orderly unfolding challenge the individual and may lead to pathology. These models derive from a worldview associated with the descriptions of change through linear differential equations, which predict a smooth, orderly world.