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The main title of this book draws our attention, but the subtitle tells us what it is about. Margaret Arden is a long-experienced British ‘Independent’ psychoanalyst who is affectionately relied upon to say, quietly and clearly, exactly what she thinks. These papers show her incisive logical mind at work — at ease with psychoanalysis and its history, she writes with clear simplicity.
She is a no-nonsense psychoanalyst, but is also interested in recognising that events, physical and mental, need, among other things, to be understood by their place in the patterns of the whole systems to which they belong. Simple one-to-one cause-and-effect explanation is good enough for everyday life; and it dominated the nineteenth-century physics and biology in which Freud grew up. However, Einstein began to break this hold; and by the 1950s biological, psychological and social sciences had grasped the importance of systems thinking. This was, I think, a historic revolution. Arden herself refers to such a systems approach as ‘holistic’. For some, this word might indicate a romantic dottiness, but there is none of this in her thinking.
In fact she turns her mind to wondering about the nature of whole systems, on both microscopic and cosmic scales. For instance, we have a crucial explanation of how identical structures can shape themselves quite differently according to where they are placed in a whole system. Thus identical muscle cells shape themselves differently according to where they are in a muscle system. The same applies psychologically to people — they change according to where they belong.
Arden shows a gift for quiet and careful wondering about whole systems and their parts. This often becomes a fascinating wonderment, even with religious glimpses at times. It will be strange to many workaday therapists, but she holds her quiet precision and scepticism, so that even convinced atheists will find it hard to dismiss her.
The first chapter is about two systemic thinkers of the la