ABSTRACT
As an illustration of clinical applications, Graham Shulman demonstrates the ways in which clinical phenomena may be thought of as strange attractors. A further clinical implication arises from the question of whether it is appropriate to think about the experience of time in a linear way when considering a subjective sense of time in a repeating clinical situation. The linear model of time assumes the "arrow of time" in which the past precedes the present and is followed by the future. It might seem even harder to conceive non-linear space than non-linear time. If strange attractors in a patient's mind are made manifest by the emergence of characteristic and repeating situations in the transference, then these situations imply both time and space. A strange attractor is not a negative hallucination, but a pattern of behaviour and associated affect which can be discerned over time.
