ABSTRACT
There is a place somewhere between living by routine automatic rules and psychological chaos. Over the past forty years, a circle of psychoanalysts have come to believe that ideas from that field should inform psychoanalysis. This chapter focuses on three central ideas of the language of chaos theory and show how they worked in an analysis. The situation in which significant but not necessarily overwhelmingly large changes lead to the exploration of new pathways is called the edge of chaos. Many efforts to apply nonlinear dynamic systems thinking to the analytic process suggest that deep resonances between analyst and analysand, are necessary for analytic work. Clearly, if a person functions in a way where the slightest perturbation causes a significantly different mode of functioning, no stability whatsoever would be possible. Psychoanalysis may be seen as a method for freeing people from fixed patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior and allowing them to creatively learn from experience.
