Lived Complexity as Psychoanalytic Epistemology: Discussion of Maxwell S. Sucharov's “Thoughts on Wholeness, Connection, and Healing: Moving Toward Complexity in the Analytic Space”

I illuminate that in Maxwell S. Sucharov's article, and the phenomenology of complexity that it articulates, the complexity of the person and the person's experience of his complexity constitute inextricably interrelated elements of a larger existential-experiential whole. Accordingly, in his framework complexity must be experienced, felt or “lived” in order to be fully known and, by extension, meaningfully useful. I show that Sucharov's writing exemplifies his thesis of lived complexity in so far as it interweaves—to great rhetorical effect—explanatory complexity theory and its philosophical or transpersonal foundations, on one hand, with evocative and illustrative stories from his own personal life and professional work, on the other hand. Sucharov's article, the product of this weave, emerges as a metalogue that brings the reader's experience of Sucharov's holistic thesis alive on contemporaneously intellectual and emotional (and perhaps spiritual) levels. I offer various expository and critical remarks on Sucharov's thinking. In the end, I contend that Sucharov's phenomenology of complexity entails a method of knowing, or epistemology, that may represent its most important and lasting contribution to psychoanalysis. In it he implores psychoanalysts (and other clinicians) to stay close to their personal experiences of complexity, and thereby to the inherent irreducibility of their own and their patients’ subjectivities, so that their thinking and clinical activities are less likely to fall prey to the myriad forms of hurtful reductionism to which we are all vulnerable.