Coherency and its Disruption in the Development of the Self

My thesis is that the concept of coherency is fundamental to understanding human psychic development and therefore to the psychodynamic therapies. Basic principles are frequently so taken for granted that we become aware of them through their absence rather than through their presence. The concept of coherency, using this term to represent the meaningful organisation of parts that make a whole, underlies such concepts as identity, integration and unification, all important aspects of personality development. In the study of infant-parental interaction coherency is beginning to be seen as a significant feature. In the psychodynamic process we are engaged in the effort to make meaningful the organisation of therapist and patient, of groups both small and large. Thus in psychoanalysis we try to make sense, to uncover and discover underlying meanings in the analytic discourse, thereby raising what might appear to be incoherent communication to the level of coherency. The more disturbed the patient, the more his utterances become incomprehensible and incoherent; and the more we have to seek in ourselves for the means to make sense to ourselves of what is being said - or left unsaid - thereby to find coherency through our understanding and to make an offer of this to the patient. Advances in the understanding of the more seriously disturbed patient, the borderline and psychotic, come from deeper insights into processes of disorganisation of thought and speech into incoherency, and through a deeper understanding of our own counter-transferential responses.

This issue of coherency is not often addressed directly in the psychoanalytic literature. The exceptions to this, Freud himself and Hans Loewald, will be discussed later. However this issue has been addressed recently by Stephen Marcus in his study of Freud's Case Histories (1984):

Freud addresses parts of experience through creating structures in written language that purport to represent, analyse and make sustained coher