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The Cosmic Circle is an accessible introduction to the quantitative research into the psychoanalytic process undertaken by Robert Langs and Anthony Badalamenti over the last decade. Langs established a reputation as an innovative and controversial psychoanalytic thinker before collaborating with Badalamenti, a mathematician, to
investigate features of psychotherapeutic interactions formally. Many readers acquainted with his views on psychoanalytic technique and the structure of the mind remain ignorant of the nature and results of this research. One reason for this is that the research is couched in terms derived from mathematics and physics which many psychotherapists (including myself) find forbidding. Even if one succeeds in understanding an investigation and its outcome, this territory is so alien to most of us that it is difficult to evaluate what these authors have so painstakingly presented. Another reason is that many psychotherapists do not understand how this research bears on their clinical practice. It is this point that I wish to take up in the present review. Although I am shamefully ignorant of both mathematics and physics, I think that the research undertaken by Langs and Badalamenti is both significant and relevant to anyone concerned with the growth of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In order to explain why this is the case, I will first need to discuss aspects of the history and philosophy of psychology and the relationship between psychoanalysis and natural science.
In creating psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud tried to develop a science of mental life. Trained as a neuroscientist during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Freud was deeply influenced by the growing scientific consensus that mental states are intimately bound up with the functioning of the central nervous system and that the. central nervous system itself is explicable purely in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry. In short, Freud believed that the mind is a part of