You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Can we develop our understanding of the mind through the application of new approaches to the study of complex systems? What are the implications for clinical practice and research when we embrace the non-linearity of the mind more fully? These are the questions addressed in this thought-provoking book edited by psychoanalyst James Rose and child psychotherapist Graham Shulman.
In the Introduction Rose explains that the book is ‘titled The Non-Linear Mind because of the daily observation that the mind is complex and complex systems are essentially non-linear. What this means is that they cannot be adequately modelled mathematically using linear equations’ (p. xi). Psychoanalytic thought and practice, particularly in the Kleinian and post-Kleinian tradition, with its emphasis on the ubiquity of unconscious phantasy, links naturally with ideas from chaos theory and works implicitly with the idea of the mind as a non-linear system. In Shulman’s chapter ‘Some research implications’ he argues that Klein anticipated some of the applications of chaos theory and the significance of its central concepts in the following extract:
The primal processes of introjection and projection lead to constant changes in the ego’s relation to its objects, with fluctuations between internal and external, good and bad ones, according to the infant’s phantasies and emotions as well as under the impact of his actual experiences. The complexity of these fluctuations engendered by the perpetual activity of the two instincts underlies the development of the ego in relation to the external world as well as the building up of the internal world.
(Klein, 1958: 239)
Shulman notes that Klein captures a fundamental characteristic of mental life and experience as it is lived and evolves over time in terms of its ‘constant changes’, ‘fluctuations’, ‘perpetual activity’, and ‘complexity’ (p. 159).
A central concept in the study of non-linear complex dynamic systems referred to repeatedly by contributors is