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For Dr. Levy-Warren, development is not something that ever stops but rather continues through the lifespan. She looks at psychoanalytic concepts in temporal terms while also taking development beyond the Oedipal. She challenges the restraints of psychoanalytic theory that sometimes fall short of developmental concerns that cannot necessarily be traced back to childhood trauma or unresolved conflicts of early life. She brings us a candidness that is refreshing and pushes us to take a second look at our assumptions. From Dr. Levy-Warren, we hear about multiple developmental timelines, including the future, existential concerns around death and dying, disruptions in development, and the importance of redefining earlier narratives that inevitably alter and reconfigure memories so we can move forward.
Psychoanalysis is currently in the throes of grappling with a developmental perspective and theory that is no longer assumed to be linear, no longer about necessarily having to pass through a series of sequentially and chronologically ordered stages rife with ditches in the form of fixations and arrests. While this does not mean throwing out a notion of stages entirely, it does involve taking into account a nonlinear model of development where past, present, and future are interconnected, one where change is a bit more unpredictable and may take place, in Adrienne Harris’s (2005) words, on the “edge of chaos,” poised between disorganization and stasis. This model of development also contains features of asynchrony, gaps, detours, ruptures, and novel integrations. As Harris describes in comparing systems to the charred ash of a fire, they form, emerge, and transform.
The first theme I select from Dr. Levy-Warren’s article is the subject of time. In psychoanalysis we have a theory that historically privileges the time of the past, yet we also value moving through time—moving forward—and not remaining a prisoner of the past. It is difficult to speak of development without speak