ABSTRACT
In this, his last published paper, Ghent attempted a radical re-thinking of our basic analytic metaphors, inspired by the revolution in developmental systems theory of Esther Thelen and the neurobiology of Gerald Edelman's Neural Darwinism. Ghent's concern in this paper lies primarily within the realm of validation, and the underlying assumption that therapeutic action resides in the recognition of the equal legitimacy of all motivational systems. From the perspective of dynamic systems theory, to the extent that the patient's psychodynamics have been organized around an implicit or explicit repudiation of some aspect of their own needs, acknowledgment, rather than rejection, will in and of itself constitute a perturbation in that system. The implications of this re-formulation of therapeutic action are part of what we might have anticipated in Ghent's future work. This perspective parallels the more recent formulations by Bromberg on the overcoming of dissociation by the validation of the claims of conflicting selfstates.
