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Simplistic Complexity: A
Discussion on Psychoanalysis
and Chaos Theory
Sergio Benvenuto
a
a
Roma, Italy
Published online: 01 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Sergio Benvenuto (2005) Simplistic Complexity: A Discussion
on Psychoanalysis and Chaos Theory, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm
Research, 61:3, 181-187
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02604020590917591
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World Futures, 61: 181187, 2005
Copyright Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN 0260-4027 print
DOI: 10.1080/02604020590917591
SIMPLISTIC COMPLEXITY: A DISCUSSION ON
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CHAOS THEORY
SERGIO BENVENUTO
Roma, Italy
Using a couple of Paul Watzlawicks clinical cases as a starting point, the author
shows how prescriptive behavioral strategies do not produce predictable effects:
the theory of (nonlinear) complex systems prevents us from establishing a pre-
cise connection between a so-called psychotherapeutic act and what we consider
therapeutic effects. It is precisely the consideration of the Lorenz attractors that
thus brings us to reconsider the long psychoanalytic work as the condition for a
general structural change of subjectivity: the result of this work is a change of the
neurotic strange attractor.
KEYWORDS: Analysis as weaning, complexity, prescriptions, psychoanalysis, psychother-
apeutic, sensitiveness to initial conditions.
1.
In the eighties Paul Watzlawick held a series of seminars in Italy. He brought two
amusing clinical examples to illustrate his psychotherapeutic philosophy.
One patient had been seriously agoraphobic for some time. He practically never
left his house. After a series of psychotherapiesall failedhe decided to end it
all. He got into his car and headed for the Pacic, meaning to plunge himself into
the ocean in his car (not a surprising choice of transport, given that in California the
private car is the only feasible transportation). As he was driving he realized that
he felt no distress. . . . He could drive! This, it appears, was a turning point for him.
The moral of the story according to Watzlawick: A proper psychotherapist would
never have prescribed to his patient something like jump into your car and kill
yourself! But in this case it might have been the most appropriate prescription.
The other case. Acouple, after twentyyears of marriage, is nolonger able tohave
sexual intercourse. He, in particular, no longer feels like it. So they go to Palo Altos
Mental Research Institute to see what they can do about it. Watzlawicks comment:
After all, I think its normal for a couple not to feel like having sex anymore after
20 years of marriage! (He reported some of these cases in Watzlawick, Weakland.)
[My own comment: if he thought it normal for a husband and wife to be bored
with each other, why go in for a cure? In other words, should psychotherapy be
Address correspondence to Sergio Benvenuto, Via Dandolo 24, Roma I-00153, Italy.
E-mail: benvenuto.jep@mclink.it
181
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182 SERGIO BENVENUTO
palmed off like some sort of cosmetic surgery? You get a facelift or nose job not
because there is something pathological about your face or nose, but to meet your
demand. And, just as cosmetic surgery is second-rate medicine, isnt this palliative
psychotherapy also somehow second-rate? But this is an issue that would take us
down a very long road.]
One evening the couple spend the night at the house of some friends, and sleep
together in a bed with one side against the walla change from their habitual bed,
open on three sides. During the night the husband gets up to pee, but to get out of
the bed he has to climb over his wife. While sleepily in the process of doing this,
he feels underneath him something of valuea naked woman!followed by
an unexpected coitus. It is the rediscovery of his wife as an erotic value: they go
back to legitimate married couple intercourse. And they live happily ever after. This
is what Watzlawick squeezes out of this story: One should not necessarily believe
that for complex and profound situationslike a marriage crisisthe right answer
need also be complex and profound. A classical analyst would start sounding out
the earliest childhood libidinal experiences and feelings, whilst in this case . . .
all they had to do was sleep on a bed set against the wall. Occasionally minimal
causes can trigger off huge effects; while, on the contrary, huge causes can produce
irrelevant effects.
2.
Watzlawick was one of the rst psychotherapists to understand the importance
of chaos and complexity theory. The two clinical examples he cites (the rst
example too, insofar as there is no linearity between the cause of the action and its
effect: the agoraphobic jumps into his car to commit suicide . . . instead he is cured
of his phobia. Systems and complexity theory rightly highlight the non-linearity
between causes and effect in living systems) evoke the meteorologist Edward
Lorenzs famous sentence, by now a sort of post-modern proverb: A buttery
apping its wings in Japan could cause a hurricane in Argentina (Lorenz, 1979).
In scientic terms, it is said that many natural processesincluding atmospheric
onesare extremely sensitive to initial conditions, in other words, very dependent
on them. If we alter ever so slightly the beginning of a long process, we will end
up with radically, even overwhelmingly, different effects. This means that many
natural processesincluding social onesare in fact unpredictable. In the same
way that heads or tails is unpredictable when tossing a coin: in fact, all that is
necessary is to alter the initial conditions imperceptiblyby varying the thrust
at the moment of tossing by an innitesimal measureand the result will be the
opposite. Precisely because it is unpredictable, we call this a chance result. So
the basic philosophical question is the following: is it unpredictable because it is
chance, or do we call it chance because it is as a matter of fact unpredictable?
And is the unpredictability due to the fact that we cannot predict it, or because the
process itself is free?
However, the contrary of Lorenzs statement is often forgotten: 20,000 huge
ventilators running in Japan do not necessarily create a draft in Argentina or
elsewhere. If it is true that minimal initial variations can cause spectacular effects,
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FOCUS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CHAOS THEORY 183
it is also true that maximum initial variations may not create any relevant effect
for us. This is because, as chaos theory teaches us, strange attractors are often
operating: variations may be huge, the process may appear chaotic, yet in the long
term a sort of secret, underlying regularity, masked by unpredictable variations,
establishes itself. Short-termresults are unpredictable, but in the long terman order
is established (an order masked by chaos), even if not a very strict one. True, no
weather forecaster will be able to tell you with absolute certainty whether it will
rain in West Hartlepool tomorrow or not, but then again you do not need to be a
weatherman to bet that next winter it will be colder in West Hartlepool than next
summer. A winter and a summer can be more or less coldthe change from one
year to the next is unpredictablebut an attractor stranger than one might think
legitimizes the prediction that next January youll have to wear an overcoat, next
July even a t-shirt will probably be too hot.
Thus, not only may minimal initial variations generate entirely different and
unpredictable processes, but phenomena that come across as purely chaotic turn
out to be attracted by a sort of inertia that is difcult to change. This is the case for
all living, homeostatic, systems: the living system tends to cushion all fortuity and
to maintain the organisms general structure. We could say that psychopathologies
reveal homeostases that are difcult to deconstructinsofar as a psychopathologi-
cal disorder means repeating the same symptom, the same mistakes, over and over.
It is, so to speak, an incapacity to learn from experience.
Watzlawick tries to bring this complexity mentality into the eld of psychother-
apy. Human processes are no less chaotic than physical ones: nothing ascertains
that cause A leads linearly to effects B, C, and D in a certain (in both its senses of
particular and sure) sequence. This is what today discredits certain classic psycho-
analytic explanations for particular pathologies, behavior, or destinies: they are too
linear (viz. simplistic). For example: why in the same family do we get one son who
becomes an active, promiscuous homosexual and an other an extremely faithful
and happy husband and father of several children? In fact, no one has ever managed
to explain what specic initial conditions are needed for one son to evolve toward
homosexuality rather than toward other tendencies, even if they share the same
parents and have passed their childhood in the same family (even if, in some cases,
you can already tell whos homosexualor hysteric, psychotic, or a mathemati-
cal geniuseven in a six-year-old). The process that brings a subject to roll toward
one sidebe it homosexual, perverse, heterosexual, hysteric, psychotic, or of po-
litical commitment, a psychoanalytic career, and so onis largely unpredictable.
In the same way, nothing can tell us that a patients therapeutic improvementor
metanoia, conversionhas resulted from certain profound interpretations of the
analyst, rather than from other interpretations (quite the contrary, there is the legit-
imate doubt that it is not the analysts interpretationswhatever analytic school
s/he belongs tothat produce effects in the subject).
3.
All this is true. But it is also true that Watzlawicks solution is not too convincing
precisely on the basis of the theory to which he refers. I want to make it clear that I
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184 SERGIO BENVENUTO
am not hostile a prioriin a moralistic wayto psychotherapeutic prescriptions.
A pluralist like me is not upset by the multiplication of approaches, and therefore
also accepts those based on prescriptions, whether they be paradoxical, systemic,
cognitivist, behaviorist, and so on. It is truly nave to believe that the analytic
approach is different from these others insofar as it is rigorously non-prescriptive.
First of all, the analyst prescribes a setting and the rules connected to thisand this
is not just a trie. Those like me who think that the analytic setting is responsible
for at least 80% of the effects of analysis do not consider irrelevant the often
very strict rules imposed by the analyst. Furthermore, one would have to be really
psychologically illiterate to believe that the analyst, because he does not explicitly
prescribe, does not prescribe in his/her own way! We know that a cough, a yawn,
a crossing of the legs are enough to prescribe to patients what to say, how to
say it, whether to say it, and so on. The famous Bion, Ive been told, late in life
set up his supervisions in such a way as to prove that the subject had the very
dreams and expressed the very thoughts that the analyst, deep down, wanted to
hear. HowKleinian your patients dreams are!, he sarcastically told the Tavistock
Clinic missionaries who told him about their cases. (I thank Bice Benvenuto, at
the time a student at the Tavistock Clinic, for having recounted this to me.) Every
analysand, like every subject, has a sixth sense that makes himor her aware of what
the other wishes or does not wish. So, in the end, psychoanalysis is as prescriptive
as any other psychotherapyexcept that it prescribes in a more rened, elegant,
sophisticated, and a bit hypocritical and politically correct way. The differentiating
point does not lie in the prescription.
But it is precisely this chaos-complexity approach that makes us see howthe sin-
gle prescription does not mean much. For example, does the case that Watzlawick
cites mean that for most cases of severe agoraphobia the analyst should prescribe
get in your car and kill yourself? Because there is no linear relation between
prescription and behavior, the former could lead to totally catastrophic effects. The
agoraphobic might actually succeed in killing himselfor, more likely, he would
give up psychotherapy. By the same reasoning, should one say to every couple
who can no longer manage intercourse to just sleep in a bed with one side against
the wall? In other cases, a husband, forced to sleep between wife and wall, might
have an attack of claustrophobia. . . . An anti-linear approach like Watzlawicks
should not lead one to believe that one carefully chosen prescription is enough to
obtain the desired effect, just as it would be laughable to make a buttery in Japan
ap its wings in the hope of causing a hurricane in Argentina. Precisely because
chaos theory teaches us that macroscopic effects are unpredictable, it is vain to
hope that certain prescriptions can change a repetitive situation hardened by time.
Prescriptions may be as strange as you wish, like the bizarre Zen enigmas (koan):
the strange attractorknown as psychopathologycan still reafrm itself. But
then, what can the psychotherapist, whether a prescriber or not, do? Whatever
he useswhether prescriptions, interpretations, the timing of sessions, silence, or
actingwhat guarantee can a shrink really have that what he or she is doing will
have a desirable effect?
I thinkananswer canbe foundinthe veryconcept of the attractor inchaos theory.
Personally, I am not a fan of long or endless psychoanalysis. On the contrary,
I believe that psychoanalysis should manage to nd a way not only to shorten
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FOCUS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CHAOS THEORY 185
times, but to get tangible results in non-geological time-spans. Having said this, in
contrast to hurried psychotherapies, a certain duration in the analytic relationship
is necessary precisely in order that it tap into chaotic, subjective processes. The
strange attractor actually revealsand may modifyitself only in the long term.
This means that, if to cure signies to get rid of the strange attractor, a small
variationis not enoughfor example, quicklyeliminatinganannoyingsymptom
to obtain a full cure.
By this I do not at all mean that, being a long relationship, psychoanalysis can be
reduced to a pedagogy, or rather a paedo-orthopaedics. It is true that analysts, over
time, somehow educate analysands: they teach them to analyze themselves. But
analysis cannot be reduced to pedagogy: in my opinion the analyst does not behave
like that good enough mother who, according to the theory, the subject never
had in childhood. (The problemremains: do I reject these approaches because they
are not real analysis, or simply because I ethically reject them? In this eld truth,
goodness and effectiveness are hard to disentangle.) The long duration of analysis
is not a pedagogical duration but rather a duration of weaningor, if you prefer,
of weaving (see Benvenuto, 2000).
4.
Thinking in terms of complexity means thinking in terms of webs (Freud too, in his
1895 Project for a Scientic Psychology [Freud, 1895], had perfectly understood
well ahead of his timethat the brain or the mind is a web). Even in analytic
psychotherapy what counts is creating a web. In an individual analysis as well, a
web of relationships is woven between the two players. But this weaving takes time.
Bad analysisthe type that ends quickly or that goes on foreveris one where the
network becomes oversimplied: the analyst begins to react predictably, one-on-
one, ego-against-ego, and so the subject reintegrates analysis in the web dominated
by the usual attractor.
So, just because in a web the effects of any input are unpredictable and largely
uncontrollable, a multitude of inputs is required for a mutation to occur. But what
do we mean by mutation? We mean that a subject changes attractor. Or even better:
to allow a subject to have many attractors in his life. A neurotic is someone who
cannot play a different tune from the usual, who repeats, in other words, the same
mistakes. Its what Freud later called the death drive: to always end up, while
seeking pleasure, in the same displeasure. Whatever the sujet ` a probl` emes does, in
one direction or the opposite, the result is always the same. This is the vainness of
cosmetic therapies that only cure individual symptoms: they raise serious doubts
on whether they really change the strange attractor that is causing the neurosis and
on whether the subject will really stop repeating his zero sum game.
But what is capable of changing an attractor? No one can tell exactly. There
are, therefore, serious symptoms that disappear in just a few sessions, whereas
apparently minor symptoms persist even after a ten-year analysis. For example,
FreudcuredGustavMahler of animpotence symptominone session. Is that Freuds
genius? No, it is just that the buttery apped its wings at the right moment. But
when that does not occur, then forms of intervention have to be multiplied in time,
until one daythere is no telling why or howthe modication . . . happens.
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186 SERGIO BENVENUTO
In the evolution of life, according to modern biology, things take place in a
very similar way. Mutations, which in Darwinian theory are always random, may
take place often but are mostly unsuccessful and are eliminated (Pievani, 2003).
Then, suddenly, a tiny mutation takes place that enjoys an overwhelming success
(often due to entirely contingent environmental circumstances): thus a newspecies
appears, like Homo sapiens. What if analysis were a bit like the evolution of
species? (Palombo, 1999). Time is needed for the analysts persistent but exible
inputs to nally be able to modify the attractor, to constitute a new speciation,
as the biologists say, that is to say the determination of a new species. I wonder,
therefore: does this persistence consist in an accumulation of inputs in the same
sense, as one swallow does not make a summer? It is not a rhetorical question.
If this hypothesis of mine is of any value, we can say that what distinguishes an
analytic therapy fromany other psychotherapy is simply the fact that it is long. It is
not really distinguished by the theoretical model to which it refers, and therefore to
the content of interpretationswhether the model be Freudian, Jungian, Bionian,
Lacanian, or Kohutian, and so on. What really cures is time. That is to say, what
with time causes caesurae, cuts, modications, the new cycle as M. Balint said.
It is with time thatthanks to the presence of the analysta subjects life can nd
emancipation from the neurotic attractor and get into new cycles.
5.
But then, someone might say, if the content of interpretations does not count at all,
why interpret? Why doesnt the analyst simply keep his mouth shut? I think that,
sooner or later, analysts can (or have to?) say somethingno matter what their
hermeneutic system of reference is, if they have one at allsimply to signify to
their subjects that they are there. That they are not pieces of stone, that the patient is
confronting himself with a subject who is interpreting in his own way. Its as if an-
alysts, when they speak, were only and always saying: Imaround, Imlistening.
And I would add: Im not applying a pre-established scheme of interpretation to
what youre telling me, Im trying to understand who you really are!
Therefore, the analyst, thanks to the setting he imposes, creates a simple
attractorregular sessions, benevolent neutrality, renunciation of acting out, and
so on. Around this spider a web is spun: this, one hopes, will modify the strange
attractor that makes up the neurosis. Thus it is not an analysts interpretations that
works, but rather what I would call his shirking away from transference. And an
analyst does shirk away from transferencethat is, he or she is not offended if
you insult them, and does not have sex with patients if they try to seduce him or
her, and so onbecause a part of him always remains outside the web. His staying
out of the web is the only show of caritas (love) that can be given. In other words,
psychoanalysis is not a question of truth, but of charity.
Transference is nothingother thanthe subjects repetitioninanalysis of the usual
modalitiesthat is, those regulated by the strange attractor. If, for example, the
analystmaybe because of his age or because he wears a moustachereminds the
subject of his/her surly father or neglectful mother, s/he will treat the analyst like
this surly father or neglectful mother. If the analyst reacted like an ordinary person,
like another Egolike any relative, friend, lover, work-mate of the subjects most
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FOCUS: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CHAOS THEORY 187
certainly wouldthe attractor would be conrmed. If, for example, the analysand
began making sly remarks against the analyst, the latter would never behave like
anyone else who felt bitten: s/he would not bite back nor would he run away.
The analyst, thanks to the simplicity of the setting s/hes protected by, can afford
not to act or react: s/he does not ght back or give up. With his or her presence,
silent or more talkative, s/he presents another possibility. Its as if the analyst said:
youre treating me like a surly father . . . but I am other. But what other? Id say
other and no more. Another who does not act or react, but persists. By maintaining
this persistence, by keeping on apping the wings a little, the perturbation can
change direction.
Thus, the analyst neither forms nor conformsrather I would say unformsthe
subject: s/he allows the neurotic coherence to disintegrate. And he succeeds with
timethrough his persistenceto un-do the strange attractor. But not because s/he
has revealed some truth to the subjecteven if the latter often has the sensation
that something has been revealed to him. Until now the analytic tradition has
been still too mired in a platonizing vision, where truth healslike in the
Gospel, the truth will set you free. Perhaps the subject is transformed simply
because the analyst, in his or her persistence, insisted.
Infact, chaos theoryis above all a mathematical theorythat deals withquantities,
numbers; an attractor is an average found in a crowd of numbers. But, at least until
now, psychoanalysis has not been quantitative: it deals with qualitative forms. This
means that once we have a real non-metrical complexity theory we will better be
able to apply it to the analytic process. We already have non-quantitative mathemat-
ical approaches, such as topologywhich is why the (rare) analysts who make use
of mathematics prefer topological tools. In fact, the analytic process itself refuses
a pure numerical treatment; rather, it needs a qualitative version of Chaos Theory.
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