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This is a long overdue review of a well-written and informative book that deserves to be widely read and reread. Robert Galatzer-Levy has compiled in one volume several papers containing his contributions over the past forty years to a new conceptualization of psychoanalytic theory, consistent with theoretical advances in mathematics that were developed to study complex systems. A clear and engaging teacher, he is uniquely positioned to guide us through this territory. He not only explains the meanings of esoteric terms—attractors, emergent properties, coupled oscillators, fractals—but also shows how these concepts are relevant and appropriate to the study of interactions in the complex dynamic system of an analytic encounter, and how they address long-standing dilemmas in classical theory.
The case examples, though, are where the book will have the most value to the practicing analyst, with well-chosen vignettes that illustrate what this perspective adds for thinking about our work. This book serves as a thorough and intelligible introduction to concepts that have entered our vocabulary and will inevitably be important in any coherent theory of analytic process. Though rigorous, it is never dry. Packed with information it never strays far from the question of what all of this has to do with caring for patients. It is also a memoir of a life immersed in teaching and learning. In fact, the best way I can describe Galatzer-Levy's book is as a love letter to the world of ideas. His enthusiasm is contagious, and I suspect that anyone who reads it will come away educated and renewed.
In The Future of an Illusion, Freud (1927) asserts that “in point of fact psycho-analysis is a method of research, an impartial instrument, like
the infinitesimal calculus, as it were” (p. 36). Freud's confidence in the objectivity and impartiality of his method of inquiry may seem quaint today, but we can appreciate his insistence that psychoanalytic theory should be rational, materialist,