Stephen Seligman

Dynamic Systems Theories as a Metaframework for Psychoanalysis

Nonlinear dynamic systems theories offer useful approaches for understanding psychoanalyses: One of the most distinctive and appealing features of psychoanalytic thinking is its focus on mental processes that defy categorization and linear explanation. Analytic therapists tolerate uncertainty, find meaning in apparently disordered communication, and embrace the unexpected twists and turns that emerge from intimate attention to the ordinary complexities of everyday life. These are hallmarks of a psychoanalytic sensibility that spans various theoretical persuasions. Non-linear dynamic systems theory embodies the same sensibilities: It emphasizes such descriptors as pattern, complexity, flux and flow, the interplay of ambiguity and order, stability and instability, and the natural value of uncertainty and generative chaos. Although systems theory may appear esoteric and overly intricate, it can be approached in an intuitive, experience-near way so as to offer a language and an imagery that underlie everyday clinical thinking. Its metaphors and aesthetics can help analysts become more precise, spacious, and immediate about basic assumptions that tend to be taken for granted. In addition to tracing this conceptual path, this paper provides a brief account of the history of nonlinear thinking in psychoanalytic theorizing and offers clinical examples.

Mentalization and Metaphor, Acknowledgment and Grief: Forms of Transformation in the Reflective Space

This paper illustrates the clinical application of current theorizing about mentalization and reflective functioning and shows how it can synergize with established analytic concepts. The paper presents a single case, that of a middle-aged woman patient with a moderate but significant history of trauma and presenting with narcissistic/borderline and masochistic dynamics. Unlike some applications of the new concepts, however, this paper does not focus the case presentation around them but instead shows how a number of processes contribute to the development of mentalization. These include corrective engagement in enacted repetitions of the patients past mistreatment, the development of a central metaphor that allows for proto-reflection and playing with painful affects, and a mourning process precipitated by the death of a family member to whom she is ambivalently attached. In the course of the presentation, then, a variety of psychoanalytic concepts are applied, such that the paper works as a synthesis of mentalization theory with them. Specifically, transference-countertransference dynamics are tracked, projective identifications and containment processes are described, interactions and interpretations lead to progressive change, and fantasies, conflicts, and internal object relations are observed and analyzed. Such direct and detailed clinical application of the concept also makes it more vivid, lucid, and experience near.

Paying Attention and Feeling Puzzled: The Analytic Mindset as an Agent of Therapeutic Change

The Relational turn has affirmed emotional interaction without losing sight of the complexities of the internal world, thus reforming psychoanalysis. This paper, however, is concerned that this well-justified enthusiasm for interaction may be distracting us from opportunities offered by analysts’ special aptitude for an open, quiet, focused mind in the midst of intense emotional and interpersonal activity. This special orientation is considered in relation to the analyst’s tolerance for ambiguity and even confusion. The effects of the analyst’s reflective concentration as a change factor in the analytic field are discussed, using nonlinear dynamic systems theories and a phenomenological perspective.

Infancy research, infant mental health, and adult psychotherapy: Mutual influences

This article considers the influence of infant research on psychodynamic theory and practice. Infant research highlights the dramatic effects of the early caregiving relationship on development throughout the life span. It also provides important perspectives on psychotherapeutic processes. This article highlights such elements as empathy, mutual recognition and attachment, along with elaborating the intersubjective and transactional systems perspectives. In addition, it stresses the powerful role of nonverbal, implicit communication and meaning-making, which play a greater role in human relational experience-and therefore in the therapeutic process-than previously understood. In addition to clarifying these general orientations, the article describes specific therapeutic strategies based on the expanded developmental knowledge.

Regression, Dissociation, Self-States, and the Developmental Dimension in Therapeutic Action

The concept of regression is at the core of psychoanalytic accounts of what goes on in analysis. It is, however, so “in our bones” that we are tempted to overlook it. In its justifiable enthusiasm of theories of self-states and dissociation, Relational psychoanalysis may be underemphasizing how much regression—both to earlier developmental stages and less organized modes of experiencing—is central in our approach to therapeutic activity and mutative action. In responding to Rina Lazar’s analysis with Sheli, I call for enhanced attention to the most powerful Freudian ideas from the new intersubjective perspectives.

Clinical Reflection and Ritual as Forms of Participation and Interaction: Reply to Bass and Stern

We agree with the commentaries that Relational psychoanalysis has stood firmly against dichotomizing clinical reflection, on one hand, and interactional processes, on the other. Still, we wonder whether the relational literature has skewed toward interaction at the expense of concentrated attention to patients’ internal worlds. Predispositions toward interaction may diminish reflective space and quiet inwardness, which are themselves forms of analytic relating. We raise the possibility that the Relational model’s inclusive breadth, valuable as it is, might sometimes impede and even devalue discussions of specific technical matters. We consider clinical conceptualizations of ritual, “relating,” and “being in contact.”

Forms in Motion: A Personal View of Object Relations

Seligman presents personal imagery and theoretical resonances about “internal object relations.” Listening to patients, he is often imagining presences in motion, in choreography, spatialization, and sometimes pictorialization of bodies experiencing and acting with people, places, things, and other environmental features. Emotions are typically engaged. He describes “shapey, blobby forms” that might organize into more specific images or narratives, which may be quite fantastical, quite realistic, or in varied blends of these and other modes. These experiences are linked to Freudian and Kleinian conceptions of phantasy and contemporary relational theories of implicit schemas, representations of relationships, and the like. Case illustrations are offered.

Illusion as a Basic Psychic Principle: Winnicott, Freud, Oedipus, and Trump

Illusion can be viewed as a creative engagement with the world, and as a central psychic motivation and capacity, rather than as a form of self-deception. Winnicott and other Middle Group writers have understood integrative, imaginative illusion as an essential part of healthy living and psychosocial development. As such, it emerges and presents itself in a variety of ways, in transaction with the realities that support or degrade it. In its absence, varied difficulties in living ensue. To elaborate and illustrate this conceptualization, Freud’s notion that the oedipus complex is resolved is reconsidered as a creative misreading of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, one based on the plausible illusion of a civilizing psychosocial development that would serve as a protective bastion against his experience of the political chaos and violence of the first decades of twentieth-century European history. Finally, the place of illusion and disillusionment among those most disillusioned by the recent election of Donald Trump in the United States is considered in relation to the recent right-wing populist turn.

Time as Process and Ground: Temporality Is Not Content

This appreciative response to the commentaries clarifies the plastic quality of temporality, at the core of consciousness. Efforts to represent “it” will always remain elusive. This approach brings phenomenological philosophy to bear to broaden the usual psychoanalytic emphasis on content in the direction of core processes of consciousness that are not usually observed.

Commentary on Kernberg and Michels.

I t is a privilege to comment on Otto Kernberg and Robert Michels’s “Thoughts on the Present and Future of Psychoanalytic Education.” Their paper reflects their insight and experience regarding all aspects of psychoanalytic institutional, intellectual, and clinical life, in the context of many decades of leadership in psychiatry and medicine. All of this affords them a rare platform from which to diagnose and offer solutions for problems on the psychoanalytic scene. Indeed, they offer a wideranging and outspoken analysis of the current status of our field. Their broad and deep familiarity with these matters has already been evidenced by their extensive contributions to the literature. This paper is timely, as the American Psychoanalytic Association is reforming the training analyst system and reevaluating the relationship between local institutes and the national, as these authors note. In addition, there is indeed much concern among analysts, in the U.S. and elsewhere, about the marginalization of analysis in the mental health care market and in academic departments of psychiatry, psychology, and social work, as well as in the broader culture. Although the two authors have substantial disagreements about the sources of the current difficulties (which they delineate openly), Kernberg and Michels offer a pungent analysis of these problems. They are united and typically forceful in their call for clearer, more objective methods to evaluate psychoanalytic competence in education and promotion. Such methods, they predict, would lead to changes in both organizational governance and curriculum, including the waning of the TA system, a prospect they deem desirable. They