Dynamic, dyadic, intersubjective systems: An evolving paradigm for psychoanalysis

Dynamic systems theory is a source of powerful new metaphors for psychoanalysis. Phenomena such as conflict, transference, resistance, and the unconscious itself are grasped from this perspective as dynamically emergent properties of self-organizing, nonlinear, dyadic, intersubjective systems. The conception of development as evolv-ing and dissolving attractor states of intersubjective systems richly illuminates the processes of pattern formation and change in psychoanalysis. Effective interpreta-tions are seen as perturbations of the therapeutic system that permit new organizing principles to come into being. A new scientific paradigm has been evolving from the investigation of phenomena that have variously been called dynamic, nonlinear, self-organizing, or chaotic systems. With origins in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, this new perspective has been applied to the study of complex biological systems (von Bertalanffy, 1968; Waddington, 1977) and is being employed in the search for common principles underlying the behavior of such diverse phenomena as chemical reactions, clouds, forests, and developing embryos and children. Dynamic systems theory (Thelen & Smith, 1994) is centrally concerned with conceptualizing the process of develop-mental change—that is, the generation of "emergent order and complexity: how structure and patterns arise from the cooperation of many individual parts " (p. xiii). In accounting for the "messy, fluid, context-sensitive " (p. xvi) nature of the developmental process, this framework is exceptionally well suited to serve as a source of guiding metaphors for psychoanalysis