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This is a surprising contribution on many levels. For many of us the surprise involves its seeming departure at right angles from the corpus of Langs' work, so well summarised in his recent clinical workbook (Langs 1992a). But in this paper his welcome earlier suggestions about genuinely communicative psychotherapeutic interventions are so encrusted with the clay of metaphor from the physical sciences that it is like archaeology to find anything to link it with his previous work. Devoted readers of this Journal, however, may find this article less unexpected: they will be aware from a book review last autumn (Livingstone-Smith 1993) of the simultaneous publication of two very different volumes which are not easy to synthesise (Langs 1992a, 1992b). And they may remember a paper some five years ago where Langs advocated the introduction of mathematics into psychoanalysis in order to permit ‘dynamical system modelling’ to impart ‘fresh views of psychoanalytic interaction and the process of cure’ (pp. 209, 210, Langs 1988). On the other hand, while the memory of this 1988 paper may have prepared some readers for Langs' enthusiasm for scientific research in psychoanalysis, they may still be taken aback by the absence in the current contribution of many of the concepts, theories and authors, largely deriving from chaos theory, which were cited there. This is a totally new language with a mass of very recent citations.
In itself novelty is far from being a problem but, in the case of trying to communicate so much that is new all at once within the 30-page limit imposed on journal articles, the authors have taken on a difficult task. Knowing their banquet could never fit into such a tiny vessel, they have opted to give us only the menu headlines rather than serving any of the courses. As a result the reader is left feeling unfed or, the intellectual equivalent, unconvinced. Perhaps they saw this as the most likely way to stimulate our appetites and motivate us to search else