Psychoanalytic Dialogues

The International Journal of Relational Perspectives

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Discussion: “Synchronicity, Acausal Connection,

and the Fractal Dynamics of Clinical Practice”

Adrienne Harris

To cite this article: Adrienne Harris (2021) Discussion: “Synchronicity, Acausal Connection,
and the Fractal Dynamics of Clinical Practice”, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 31:4, 487-492, DOI:
10.1080/10481885.2021.1926789

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1926789

Published online: 23 Jul 2021.

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PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES
2021, VOL. 31, NO. 4, 487–492
https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2021.1926789

Discussion: “Synchronicity, Acausal Connection, and the Fractal

Dynamics of Clinical Practice”
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D.
New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, New York City, New York, USA

ABSTRACT
A discussion of Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro’s model of fractal epistemol­
ogy as clinically useful in the exploration of uncanny resonances in
clinical dialogue. Arguing for the relevance of fractal epistemology for
both the presence of resonance and of complex difference.

Introduction
The presence of nonlinear dynamic systems theory, or, as it is termed here, fractal episte­
mology, is increasingly established in psychoanalytic writing and theorizing. We are learn­
ing that these conceptualizations have wide application both in thinking about psychic
structure and various formations of complex subjectivity and in clinical process. The
flexibility and wide ranging applicability of these models is striking.
Nonlinear dynamic systems is actually perhaps more familiar to us than we think. I would
say that this conception is at the heart of a very ubiquitous model of development in psycho­
analysis and psychology. Elements of this perspective can be found in Bion’s (1959, 1961)
alpha work, and in Laplanche’s (1989, 1997, 1999) enigmatic messages and translations. The
Barangers (1963) and South American analysts like Pichon-Riviere (2015) all propose and use
a model of development – macro and micro - which is dialectical, modeling transactions of
many different kinds are viewed as a kind of helix, sometimes a double helix.
I think we can see signs and elements of dynamic systems modeling in the cognitive
theories of Piaget and Vygotsky (Harris, 2020; Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994). In both these
theorists’ work, patterns or thinking and speaking are the outcome of a transaction co-
produced by the individual and many kinds of interlocutors. The building of symbolization
or patterns of thought through increasingly complex transactions, fractal epistemologies in
Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro’s language is a useful revisioning of much cognitive and develop­
mental theory.
In my own work (Harris, 2005), I have come to think of the binaries of gender, of sexual
difference and sexuality, of race, class, and of the generations, as emergent complexity with
resonance and difference that dissolve and reform. We hold them. They hold us. We see
how obsolete and also how dangerous these binaries can be. We can remain in thrall and we
rebel. The binaries of race and gender and sexuality function as interpellating forces within
psychoanalytic theory, it is also true that psychoanalysis in a variety of critical projects has
pushed against this doctrinal pressure. I will argue that Laplanche’s model – its dialectical

CONTACT Adrienne Harris, Ph.D. adrienneeharris@gmail.com PO Box 1671, Sag Harbor, NY 11963.
Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
488 A. HARRIS

and emergent properties, its focus on emergence offers some new ways to think of the
development of gender and sexuality and the complex intersectional interweave of various
categories of subjectivity: class, culture, race along with gender and sexuality. This is
a model where boundaries are inherently unstable and ambiguous.
Laplanche (1999) built a theory that, with sensitivity and tact, he both embedded in
Freudian theory even as he critiqued Freud’s one person approach. I think what Laplanche
proposes takes us to a new and somewhat different model of the unconscious, more akin to
the work of Matte-Blanco (1975) on what he called “bi-valent logic.” Laplanche’s and Matte
Blanco’s theoretical model make sound contact with the contemporary interest in non-
represented experience, primitive mental states and layers of unconsciousness (Levine et al.,
2013; Ogden, 2019; Stern, 1997) I think Laplanche’s powerful model is closely kin to the
Italian Bionians, (Civitarese, 2015; Ferro, 2006) as they are conceptualizing reverie and its
interweave of dream, emotion, thought.
I understand that in his agenda in building this theory, Laplanche wanted above all to
create a theoretical and psychic space for desire and sexuality as arriving from outside, from
the other. And crucial to this project was the enigmatic, i.e. unconscious aspects of these
transmissions, unconscious and never completely translatable either to sender or receiver
(adult and child) This allowed him to conceptualize sexuality in any one as a mixture of the
enigmatic, the alien (from the other) and the elements of sexuality itself. This is a vision of
sexuality as a fractal system involving unconscious communication, desire and alterity.
In the light of these evolutions post Laplanchian, I want to expand what is potentially
transmitted in a message and to see the interweaving of various categories of subjectivity (race,
gender, class for example) within what is a message that transmits sexuality. In drawing on
interpellation, a concept migrates from political theory and we can imagine the powerful
constructions through which the political and the social come to inhabit the personal internal
world (Guralnik, 2011; Harris, 2007; Rozmarin, 2007, 2009). Additionally, I see the mechan­
ism, or the apparatus of enigmatic message as a process whereby a spectrum of traumatic
experiences (lethal and usual) will be intergenerationally transmitted.
The enigmatic maternal seduction may be, in addition to its various effects of establish­
ing unconsciousness and sexuality in the infant and evolving child also an act of interpella­
tion. I do not mean this as an always consciously intended communication. Interpellations
arise in many forms across a spectrum of conscious and unconscious experience. It might be
interesting to think of a message which installs some aspects of sexuality in the child
simultaneously shames and forbids this formation.
Jacqueline Rose has examined the powerful demand for recognition that gender and
gender in some engagement with sexuality imposes on everyone.

At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for
gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the
blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender,
neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-
based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectiv­
ities. ‘In these pages,’ the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will
meet persons who could be characterizesed, and could recognise themselves, as one – or some –
of the following: a girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy who is a girl, a girl who is a boy dressed as
a girl, a girl who has to be a boy to be a girl.’ We are dealing, Stryker explains, with ‘a
heteroglossic outpouring of gender positions from which to speak’. (2019, p. 4)
 PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 489

In listening to a range of trans voices, Rose problematizes the binary of sex and of gender
but in the process always asks us to consider the notion of “natural”, the question of “real”.
We all fail at gender and gender and sexuality interpenetrate in ways that may induce envy,
panic, excitement, or all at once in the surrounding social field, including with intimate
partners. It is in these kinds of theoretical formulations that Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro’s
fractal epistemology seems so relevant.

Caesura as a fractal structure

Caesura is another well-developed concept in Bionian and post Bionian thinking seems very
well matched with the concepts of resonance and the interobjective zone. Caesura has had
a particularly rich life in post-Bionian theory (Civitarese, 2008, 2015).
Registering the simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity, caesura makes room for
gaps and instability and fluidity and ongoingness. Imagine gender or sex binaries through
the lens of caesura and the world moves and opens up.
Civitarese (2008) summarizes the complex way that Bion uses caesura to take us beyond
binaries. After a considerable focus on the force of rupture and movement in caesura, the
caesura of birth, of death, of truth and lies, of self and other, Civitarese turns to the other
force in caesura:
But if that is the way things are, Bion wonders, how is it possible to transcend the caesura? How can
one “[break] through the barriers” (Bion, 1970, p. 114)? And lastly, what might be the “means of
communication,” the “Language of Achievement” (Bion, 1970, p. 4, p. 2)? His answer is that we
need to resort to non-pathological splits. This precept can be understood as an invitation to use
a variety of viewpoints; that is, the caesura implicit in all discrimination must not inhibit thought or
become reified or static. Only when this condition is satisfied does the shifting play of caesuras
become equivalent to the respiration of the mind: “[. . .] the diaphragm is the important thing; the
caesura is the important thing; that is the source of the thinking” (Bion, 1977/1989 p. 511).
Transcending the caesura, or disturbing the binary system — or, as Grotstein (1998) puts it,
disturbing ‘the universe’ — which regulates the production of sense becomes the general model
of a dynamic thought, of a thought that tolerates insecurity and ambiguity, or, in other words, the
presence of a plurality of meanings, the paradox of more than one truth and the aporias of reason.
The barrier can be broken through by the interplay of different points of view, the deconstruction
permitted by free associations and the dissemination of sense, and by negative capability and
transitive thought (thought which succeeds in overcoming the barriers). (2008, p. 1131)

As many have argued, order emerges from complexity and order arises in a nonlinear
system. Sander and others pay attention to the process in development when experiences of
being with and experiences of being distinct exist and evolve simultaneously. This is a way
of thinking of development as emerging from primary intersubjectivity and from the co-
evolution of externality and internality (Loewald, 1980; Winnicott, 1971). What is useful for
psychoanalytic thinking broadly is that experience is neither solely individual not solely
systemic.
Stern (1985) and the Boston Change Process Group (2013) have found NDS very useful
in modeling the co-evolution and nonlinearity of the procedural and the symbolic.
Similarly, Reis (2009) in developing a concept of enactivity draws on NDS to think of the
development of alpha work which very uniquely is a process where an intersubjective
experience, the reverie and work of the adult to digest experience with the child becomes
digested by the child such that the child is now able to perform that function. Reis (2009)
490 A. HARRIS

argues that an intersubjective field has been internalized. NDS thus, in my view, has a lot to
offer the current models of interaction and intersubjectivity which utilize metaphors such
as: a spiral process (Pichon Riviere) or digestion (Baranger and Baranger) or caesura and
transformation (Bion, Ferro, Civitarese). In other work, there is a focus on the element of
sensitivity in NDS, on its capacity to frame and model the unruly, unpredictable, sponta­
neous and emergent experiences observed in children and enacted in treatment.
In this paper, fractal epistemologies are used to describe and theorize experience of
resonance, of self-similarity, within an analytic dyad, what at one point is called interobjec­
tive space, evoking Benjamin’s notions of thirdness, but also going beyond it. It is always
both complex and daring to evoke the uncanny in many discursive worlds, certainly in
psychoanalysis. Here, I think that the analysis of uncanny phenomena in interpersonal
space and communication fits particularly well in our current preoccupation of what Ogden
(2019) has termed the “ontological” turn in psychoanalysis. He distinguishes between
theories which position the analyst in relation to knowledge and those that are interested
in the analyst’s experience as the site of transformation. Foehl (2008) has written about this
in an examination of the work of Edgar Levenson.
I have some reservation to the use of the term “uncanny”, to describe the resonances and
trans or interobjective experiences that can appear in clinical encounters and that are
explored in the clinical material with the patient Abe. The term conjures up magic and
the supernatural, while in the essay, the authors are committed to the lived plausibility of
deep and powerful conscious and unconscious transaction through which patient and
analyst come to exist in the treatment situation together. I think more that the model of
fractal epistemology is the exact model to describe the flow of conscious and unconscious
material across the analytic dyad. The history or the patient, its replication in the treatment
would have been detailed in many complex communications. I think we do not need to
evoke magic, the model of fractal epistemology is good and complex enough to unpack the
data.
Reviewing Levenson’s recent work I noted the following:

What characterizes Levenson’s unique contribution, is the demand on the analyst to practice in
states of radical indeterminacy, to assume an enigmatic encounter in treatment in which both
analyst and analysand can, indeed must, change, but in ways that may remain obscure and
uncertain. Levenson is quite definitively against the idea of the certainty of interpretation or
even the clarity of under whose watch change is occurring. One might well, Levenson argues,
emerge from a treatment where transformations agreeable to both participants had occurred
and not know exactly how and why the change had taken place. One of his abiding interests has
been to think about how we can practice in this degree of uncertainty and indeterminacy.
(Harris, 2018, p. 792)

Thinking of Levenson in this way and in dialogue with Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro (this issue),
we can build a vision of the clinical situation in which fractal epistemologies allow boundaries,
boundary crossings, resonance AND mutative difference. What I think is important to notice
is that we have a number of theories engaged in thinking about the clinical problems of
transference and countertransference. In this essay, Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro (this issue)
ask us to include nonlinear dynamic systems approaches to our widening repertoire of clinical
explanation. It is a welcome event to see the authors use these models in such interesting ways.
I found myself trying to synthesize the use of fractal epistemologies as Marks-Tarlow and
Shapiro (this issue) describe and develop a vision of uncanny resonance and emergence and
 PSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUES 491

also a space for complex difference. Could we think of uncanny resonance as a process
available to us all, in analysis and in life, to make resonant identifications across differences.
In the realms of gender and sexuality, we have built a lot of theory and clinical application in
the understanding of profound differences in forms of desire and attachment. We have
needed to bring into our understanding of subjectivity the concept of intersectionality,
which allows us to track difference across class, race, and other categories or experience. But
might fractal epistemologies also allow us to experience resonance, an experience that
avoids exploitation or control of the other. What is common across boundaries might be
useful to think of alongside what is different. If we could both tolerate difference and let our
imagination explore sites of commonality, of resonance, and of shared experience. What is
useful about fractal epistemologies, is the model’s capacity to hold resonance and emergent
difference.

Notes on contributor
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is on the faculty and is a supervisor at the Psychoanalytic
Institute of Northern California. She is an Editor at Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Studies in Gender
and Sexuality. In 2009, She, Lewis Aron, and Jeremy Safron established the Sandor Ferenczi Center at
the New School University.

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