The present article conceives the self as a perpetual flowing process. The self is best illustrated by comparison to a flowing river that whoever dips in would experience as different at any given point in time. It may, at the same time, be observed from above—not only from within the water. Psychoanalysis as a flowing process is illustrated through a clinical example of a self who is “stuck” and the work accomplished by analyst and patient together to renew motion. The presentation focuses on the moments of intervention on the part of the analyst as exemplifying the point in time of reviving the process. These moments are open to diverse interpretations to which varied psychoanalytical schools contribute. The variety of interpretations of the analyst’s interventions and the patient’s responses, as well as of the factors that contribute to the transformation of the self, corresponds to the concept of the self and of psychoanalysis itself as multifaceted processes.

Drawing on history, philosophy, and complexity thinking, I address some limitations and possibilities in our theory for tackling the thorny and stubborn problem posed by White-centeredness. Although this article is written largely with White U.S. culture in mind, that situation is a fulcrum for explorations of inclusion and exclusion more generally.1

Psychoanalytic complexity theory expands our understanding of the psychotherapeutic process and action, as many others have demonstrated, but it also enhances our grasp of the phenomenology of complexity, that is, the feeling of living in and with the irreducible complexity of human experience, of being open to novelty, and of embracing the vulnerability that our human existential uncertainty entails. In this article, I contend that the clinical value of psychoanalytic complexity theory is intertwined with the theoretical description of complexity. I describe the ways that my technical theoretical awareness of complexity supported my work with a challenging patient—ultimately promoting a relational process that supported our ability to live at “the edge of chaos” and enabling the patient to embrace formerly unrecognized life possibilities.

In this discussion, I examine and elaborate on ideas about change as they relate to complexity theory and to the case presentation described in Margy Sperry’s article.

Kohut was instrumental in shifting our attention from the removal of individual defenses in the service of making the unconscious conscious to emphasizing the importance of empathically understanding the healthy, self-protective usefulness of defenses, both developmentally and during the therapeutic process. Despite this pivotal change in reactive tone toward defenses, there have been few experiences near attempts to describe how we help patients to modify characterological defenses that interfere with the healing process. In this article, I suggest that one of the most important but unrecognized ways we work through these resistances is by facilitating a shift in the patient from the need for self-protective defensiveness to a felt relational protectiveness. Verbatim clinical examples illustrate a protective attitude and explain how relational protectiveness is actualized when dealing with characterological defenses.

This article suggests that late 20th and early 21st century research in several academic disciplines is slowly eroding many of the distinctions that once divided contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, such as interpersonal and relational analysts, intersubjective-systems theorists, and self psychologists. The research points to complexity, unpredictability, and randomness in human minds and relationships—now seen by many analysts as nonlinear dynamic systems. The article outlines a few of the historically more divisive concepts and selectively reviews recent research findings that tend to bring the earlier competing theories more closely into alignment.

This article explores the idea that relationships of attachment security are simultaneously relationships of mutual desire. Seen through this lens, separation and reunion behavior become increasingly psychologically charged: infant and mother as well as patient and analyst must revisit their willingness to expose their desire in each encounter. By recognizing that personal agency is vital to both healthy attachment and romantic desire, we can begin to appreciate the dawning of romantic desire, not so much as promoting “separation-individuation” as often conceived, but as exerting a gravitational pull to revisit an original love—one that is now erotically reconceived. We reclaim an original love but now in a relational context between mother and the Other, the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal, the familiar and the stranger.

I view Gentile’s attempt to see desire and attachment as inherently working together from an existential–adaptive perspective and how, as I see it, they must work together dialectically—both developmentally and as a complex system (Coburn, 2015). A clinical–developmental narrative illustrates the larger context within which these dialectical tensions between attachment and desire enable us to probe, evaluate, and create the realness and trustworthiness of all intimate relationships—from birth onward throughout the lifecycle and in the treatment setting (Slavin and Klein, 2013).