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William Coburn has written a fine book that I think will generate interest and, I suspect, some controversy. What else can be asked for from a book? This review will focus on Coburn's core thesis regarding the sources, influences, and organizing dynamics that give rise to subjective experience, or more specifically, momentary and evolving subjective states (the experience of agency, for instance). In understanding subjective states, Coburn emphasizes the role of context and his thinking is informed by the literature on complex systems. He sees complexity theory as providing sound footing for what he describes as psychoanalysis's move from “objectivism to perspectivism,” adding that complexity theory in particular, “… sheds a much more radical light on the central and relentless role of context in understanding emotional life and the meaning-making process” (p. 6).
Although I disagree with a couple of Coburn's characterizations, in general, he makes good use of many of the ideas and concepts advanced by complexity theorists. From my vantage point, the key to understanding his “contextualist” perspective is appreciating the way he draws on complexity theorists’ discussion of the open, nested, and nonlinear nature of systems, as well as circular causality and emergence.
To get hold of these ideas and their implications, let's consider, as Coburn does, the psychotherapy dyad. The psychotherapy dyad
is an open system, comprised of two mutually influencing (coupled) subsystems, the patient and analyst. (This is consistent with Galatzer-Levy's [2009] discussion of the dyad as a system of “coupled oscillators.”) Through their nonlinear interaction, the patient's and analyst's evolving subjective states both influence and are influenced by the other, to a greater or lesser degree. In addition, each member of the dyad contributes to what I’ll call for ease of exposition, the therapeutic alliance—the affective quality of the dyadic system. The alliance, in turn