ABSTRACT
The empirical study of psychoanalysis has proven devilishly difficult. From his earliest investigation, Freud tried to support his theories with data from the psychoanalytic situation, and, from that time until the present, this effort has foundered on recurring problems. Nonlinear dynamics system theory suggests that the received version of mathematical-based prediction in the sciences is unduly narrow. Catastrophe theory models lead to specific predictions about how quantitative changes in intensity result in qualitative changes in a system's activity. At the same time that students of dynamic systems were discovering that certain kinds of predictions were not possible, explorations of dynamical systems showed that a different and surprising kind of prediction was possible. Applying the idea of self-similarity to psychoanalytic data addresses one of the major problems of research—the intractable amount of data. Recent developments in the study of dynamical systems provide a new vision of what it means to predict the evolution of a system.
