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.
When Henry Lothane approached me with the suggestion of creating an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry devoted to free associations, I thought it would be an interesting project of focusing on an original clinical idea and following it to the present. I could not have imagined that this Freudian concept had such power to bridge the objective and subjective, but, more importantly, to touch the heart and soul of being human.
As I first read the articles in this issue, my thoughts took me to Jonathan Lear’s (1990) first book, Love and Its Place in Nature, where he argued that Freud began a revolution, the results of which have been barely realized. Freud showed us that by using psychoanalysis as a method, we have within our grasp a science of subjectivity.
My thoughts then took me to Seven Brief Lessons on Physics written by Carlos Rovelli (2014), a theoretical physicist, head of the Gravity Group at the Centre de Physique Theorique of Aix-Marseille University, one of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory.
With the help of a progression of theories—Newtonian, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics—he wrote:
Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange and multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from or true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity revels to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be part of our world. [Rovelli, 2014, p. 79]
Then my thoughts led me to Gerald Edelman (1992), who formulated that the mind arises from the billions of neural loops transmitting impulses in such rapidity and intensity that mind is created which is something like a holograph.
Then the idea came to me that