ABSTRACT
The study of emergence is central to the difference between the reductionist program and the sciences of complexity. This chapter explores the origins of emergence in complex systems and shows how an appreciation of emergence can inform psychoanalytic listening, understanding, and interventions. Emergence is a concept from the study of complex and nonlinear systems that can reshape the way analysts think about therapeutic change and development. It is the way in which new, unexpected, and qualitatively new and distinct configurations suddenly appear in complex systems. It constitutes an alternative to preplanned development that is particularly likely to be active in the areas of brain function that interest psychoanalysts. Emergence opens the way for analysts to appreciate these phenomena when they occur and discourages distortion of them in mistaken attempts to reduce them to underlying continuities. The concept of emergence might also inform analytic technique concerning the analyst's role in a treatment process.
