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New ways of understanding the world occasionally reorganize wide areas of knowledge. Sometimes these new understandings apply principally to specific disciplines. Others have application across many fields and change the ways in which whole civilizations see the world.
The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process is the first book-length work to attempt to relate many of the concepts deriving from complexity theory to clinical psychoanalysis. Using an extended case description, clinical vignettes, and generalizations about the analytic situation, the author shows how ideas drawn from complexity theory can enrich our understanding of the psychoanalytic process.
Historically speaking, the mechanization of the world view1 shifted understanding of the physical world from explanations based on God's intentions to explanations rooted in impersonal, mathematically describable forces. The publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 was the nodal point of that shift. Using just three physical laws of motion, Newton showed that the mathematical methods today referred to as calculus could be used to explain a startling array of physical phenomena.
For three centuries, Newton's ideal of explanation and his mathematical methods have dominated the physical sciences and have been the goals, if not the actuality, of the biological and social sciences. The core mathematical idea has been that by relating the rates of change of measurable quantities to the current values of those quantities, scientists can calculate how the quantities change over time. These relationships, called differential equations, are used to study everything from subatomic interactions, to the firing of neurons, to migrations of animal populations and the motions of the galaxies. Inordinate efforts to find methods to solve differential equations have yielded a magnificent collection of ways to work with them and have led to much of the development of modern science. These equations