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“If you’re alive, you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, jump around a lot, and at the least think noisy and colorfully, for life is the very opposite of death.”
— Mel Brooks
What more is there to say after the creative contributions of our gracious and generous discussants? They have admirably fulfilled their charge, to respond to our presentations with commentary that tackles the thorny and fascinating question of what is essential in the way analysts help their patients.
We hope we have flapped our arms and legs vigorously enough to breathe a little more life into our subject.
Our authors present us with a wide-ranging array of ideas in their efforts to answer the questions posed by this issue. If one could extract a shared theme, it might be that the essence of analysis includes something more than the analyst’s interpreting the analysand’s verbal productions to enhance the analysand’s insight. There are many important aspects of the “something more,” but they have in common the analyst promoting a lively, creative relationship that enables the analysand to develop new ways of experiencing his internal and external worlds, and consequently new ways of thinking, feeling and doing.
The concept of emergence, which has been fruitfully employed in the examination of scientific, social, and artistic phenomena, can help us understand broadly how analysis works. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties or behaviors its parts do not have on their own. They emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole, creating new and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization of complex systems. Peter Corning detailed these characteristics of emergence: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in the component elements), (2) coherence or correlation (integrated wholes maintain themselves over time), and (3) generation by a dynamic process (evolution) (Wikipedia, updated 2020).
Psychoanalysis entails and foste