Transitions in psychic structures in the light of deterministic chaos theory

The author begins by discussing the recent development of deterministic chaos theory to account for physical phenomena of seeming disorder formerly regarded as random, especially in the field of complex, dynamical systems. With reference to both the scientific and the psychoanalytic literature, he seeks in this paper to draw parallels between this new information and certain aspects of psychic functioning as observed in psychoanalysis. Expanding previous authors' analogies and presenting some original ones of his own, he bases his argument on the role of strange attractors in the 'chaotic' functioning of complex systems and on the concepts of state-to-state transitions, the tuning variable and period-doubling cascades. Unconscious fantasies are shown to be a form of strange attractor and to be fractal in nature, as illustrated by a clinical example. The author goes on to examine the transitions of psychic structures between states and discusses how the transference/countertransference relationship and the early infantile relationship may be compared to a tuning variable in determining such transitions. In terms of methodology, he uses the concepts of the analogy-based model and of analysis in a widened sense to forge links between the physicomathematical field of deterministic chaos theory and the psychic field proper to psychoanalysis.