The Uses of Disorder—Chaos Theory and Psychoanalysis

Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order, covered in seaweed— R. Callaso (1993)

PSYCHOANALYSIS IS HAUNTED BY a peculiar dilemma. For all of the immense effort which has been invested in metapsychological theories, and for all the subsequent, and often acrimonious disputations about their comparative values; there remains considerable doubt about the relevance of those theories to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Anna Freud, in 1969 said, "[Theory] … has become the bugbear of the clinically oriented analyst who feels wholly divorced from it"; a skepticism still shared by many practitioners of the craft, who genuflect in the direction of their institutional canons—and then do whatever they think works (A. Freud, 1969, p. 386). Astute clinicians have always understood that they were, in Masud Khan's felicitous phrase, "the servants of the patient's process".1 That is, therapy proceeded by our tapping into, and melding with, a mysterious flow, a conflux, which defies the linear explanations provided by metapsychologies which explain everything and understand nothing. The Sufi's were wont to say, somewhat sarcastically, "No problem is too difficult for a theoretician". If this were really so, then any polished theoretician would be ipso facto an accomplished clinician; and that is clearly not the case. Talking knowledgeably about something is not at all the same as doing it.

I would like to explore, in greater detail, aspects of the therapeutic process which, I believe, operate in some realm not accessible