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Metaphors for the functioning of the mind are often drawn from the science and engineering of the cultural moment: hydraulics in fountains or dams, electrical and magnetic forces, the modular components of computers. Some of our preexisting intuitions about these real-world phenomena become assimilated into the psychoanalytic vocabulary over time. For example, if “psychic energy” is conceived of as electricity, it makes sense to speak of it being “discharged,” like a capacitor. But intuitions arising from our experience with these phenomena can lead us astray if we try to map them directly onto our psychoanalytic understanding. Robert M. Galatzer-Levy’s Nonlinear Psychoanalysis: Notes from Forty Years of Chaos and Complexity Theory argues that a significant error of this kind, imported from classical science and mathematics into our experience of patients, is our conception of linearity, in which “effects are assumed to be proportional to causes” (p. 9).
In mathematical generality, a function f(x) is linear if f(x1 + x2) = f(x1) + f(x2) and if, for any scalar k, f(kx) = k f(x). (The word linear, here and throughout, is not restricted to the usual meaning of “like a line.”) For many aspects of our lives, a linear regime feels familiar: “If I throw a ball slightly harder, I expect it will go slightly further. When I press the accelerator of my car a bit further down, I expect the car to go slightly faster” (p. 143).
As Galatzer-Levy tells us, though, the latter example is an illusion, since it takes sophisticated automotive engineering to translate pressure on the gas pedal into smooth acceleration of the car and, ultimately, the gas fed into the engine is not proportional to the depression of the pedal, even if it seems as though it ought to be. Apart from deliberate human designs like the car, we can mistakenly feel the world is linear because we can most easily understand linear phenomena, and we have a “systematic, unconscious inattention to intractable problems” (p