ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is a very particular way that one person can be of use to another, a way that depends on our possession of common practices but also on our awareness that those practices are often inadequate to the experience that makes up our immersion in process. Clinical process is the medium-or to use the language of nonlinear systems theory, the event space-within which narrative stagnates, grows, and changes: The destabilization of old narratives and the emergence of new ones are the outcomes of unpredictable relational events. Events seem arbitrary and do not fall into narrative order. Affect is flattened or diminished; one may consciously feel only a kind of numbness or deadness. The important thing about a new understanding and this applies no matter whether the analyst or the patient who offers it-is less its novel content than the new freedom revealed by its appearance in the analytic space, a freedom to feel, relate, see, and say differently than before.
