On Deciphering the Book of Nature: Human Communication in Psychotherapy

This paper comments on the important immediate practical clinical significance of the investigative work of Badalamenti and Langs, which approaches individual sessions of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a dynamical system in action capable of being quantified and even formally described by the tools of contemporary mathematical modeling. The author suggests that viewing sessions qualitatively as dynamical systems provides some guidelines that can aid the clinician in observing arriving at interpretations, and assessing the fruition of his interventions. Recent efforts to practice psychotherapy and psychoanalysis according to some qualitative principles of dynamical systems theory are presented. The author draws the important distinction between a systems set of mind and approach and an essentialist approach to clinical phenomena. He suggests that the essentialist approach dominates most observation and formulation in the psychotherapy and psychoanalytic literature about what occurs during therapy sessions and this leads to a considerable loss of information about the specifics of the interactional feedback between events in the therapy session, compared to what becomes accessible through a systems orientation.