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Dear Sir,
Quinodoz (IJPA, 78: 699-719) postulates that the psyche behaves like a chaotic system and thus according to a sensitive dependency to initial conditions. He writes: ‘In my view, sensitivity to initial conditions is indeed the characteristic feature of the unpredictability of human behaviour and psychic functioning. For example, it is never possible to tell in advance what course an individual's thoughts will take, how he will decide a particular issue or in what way he will act, because even seemingly minor causes may have unexpected effects … It is only after the thought has entered the mind, the decision has been taken or the action performed that one can retrospectively reconstruct the succession of psychic events that have brought about a specific thought, decision or action, and the initial conditions from which the divergence stemmed will be discoverable only afterwards' (p. 704). It is not easy to understand how this can be brought together with the fact that sensitive dependency to initial conditions in chaotic systems always destroys history and makes reconstruction impossible. Here the unpredictability in one direction goes together with the impossibility of reconstruction in the other (Küppers, 1996, p. 171).
Furthermore, Quinodoz claims to show ‘that the unconscious fantasies constitute an organising structure that has all the characteristics of a fractal object as observed in strange attractors’ (pp. 706-7). As all fractal objects are geometrical objects, this is difficult to conceive. An unconscious fantasy is, I guess, not a geometrical object; it is rather something like a concept certainly to be identified on different ‘scales’ in the consulting room (cf. Galatzer-Levy, 1995). But does this suffice to see it as equivalent to a ‘strange attractor?’
Quinodoz goes on to state that the stability of a system, its capability ‘of damping out perturbations of the system and of thereby maintaining a certain stability’, is related to the dimens