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Margaret Arden is a senior psychoanalyst of the independent group. Her analyst was Charles Rycroft who, by quietly letting his membership fee to the Institute of Psychoanalysis lapse, became a truly independent Independent. Margaret Arden, a recognized authority on his life and work, reflects this patrimony.
The eight papers in this book were all published between 1980 and 1997. Their connecting theme is wholeness. This is the wholeness that connects nature and the physical world, science and religion, subject and object. Arden levels the charge at psychoanalysis that it ‘is recognised as a power to the rediscovery of wholeness. However, the means by which this happens is largely absent from theory’ (p. 3). She complains (p. 1) that there is a gap between psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice. She suggests that psychological truth is to be found as much in religion as in analysis (p. 3), not through scientific procedure but through symbolic meaning. The transformation produced by insight in the consulting room is symbolically equivalent to the spiritual journey towards enlightenment. The truth of the patient is manifest in the transference/counter-transference situation through which ‘the analyst acts as midwife to the patient's truth of who she or he is’ (p. 4). Whence the title.
In order to address the gap, Arden discusses and explores the ideas of various writers, of whom I shall mention in particular Bateson, Bohm and Matte Blanco. For Bateson, mind is immanent in nature as an intricate signalling system. Bohm goes further and conceives of an implicate order or holomovement. This is ‘thought of as a process of enfoldment and unfolding in multi-dimensional space. The dimensionality of the universe is effectively infinite. The explicate order consists of relatively stable independent sub-totalities unfolded from the total holomovement’ (p. 32). Arden suggests that in this system, the distinction between animate and inanimate, mind and matter only exists