Context is Everything! Book Review of Psychoanalytic Complexity: Clinical Attitudes for Therapeutic Change

As a psychoanalytically-minded theorist and clinician dedicated to ushering in a complexity model of mental health and clinical practice (see Marks-Tarlow, 2008, 2011), I am pleased to review William Coburn’s new book, Psychoanalytic Complexity: Clinical Attitudes for Therapeutic Change (2014). This slender but pithy tome represents the latest volume of Routledge’s Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series. Coburn describes the historical roots of complexity science, identifies clinical attitudes consistent with complexity science, illustrates complexity attitudes in practice through a sprinkling of cases, and ties his clinical approach into the writings of fellow psychoanalysts. Through this combination of elements, Coburn achieves the balance between research, theory and clinical application sought by Joseph Lichtenberg, Editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series.

Roots of complexity theory extend at least as far back as ancient Greece, when the philosopher Heraclitus reflected upon the dynamic, ever-changing flux of reality. Heraclitus famously observed that we can never step into the same river twice. His student reputedly added a psychological dimension by declaring we can never step into the same consciousness twice. Despite ancient roots, the formal sciences of complexity are relatively new, tracing back to 19th century mathematicians such as Weierstrauss, Hilbert, and Riemann among others. Of them all, it was Henri Poincaré who broke open

the future when he established the certainty of uncertainty in nature. Unable to find order in the erratic trajectories of three celestial bodies orbiting around one another, unfortunately Poincaré was alone with his work and drove himself mad trying to tame the chaos. Only in the 1960s, with the research of meteorologist Edward Lorenz, did nature’s unpredictability become formalized in