A. H. Stein, New York, NY

Abstract: The physics and biology that found psychoanalysis account for discontinuous experience only in the presence of nonmeasurable, metaphysical operators; these include the ego and its subsystems as well as biological experience inherited through Lamarckian principles. Complex, self-organizing systems, however, can link biology to experience without metaphysics. They can also account for psychoanalytically relevant behaviors without appealing to stable internal representations. These behaviors include what W. R. Bion called "transformation in O" and its corollary, the appearance of the "selected fact." By dimensionality exploding the "double-headed arrow" that he used to link the states Ps and D in his model for thinking (Ps lt;-» D), we can generate a space that is, at once, psychoanalytically "imaginal" and dynamically coadapting. Isomorphic to D. W. Winnicott's "transitional space," it is self-organizing. It is describable according to dynamics formulated by W J. Freeman, S. Kauffman and C. Langton and it can generate instantaneous conscious contents by way of a selective process analogous to spatio-temporal "binding." As a whole, this model supports a clinical stance advanced by D. W. Winnicott as "play, within transitional space."

Keywords: nonlinear dynamical systems, philosophy of psychoanalysis, thinking, W. R. Bion, D. W. Winnicott