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MIDWIFERY OF THE SOUL: A HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON PSYCHOANALYSIS. COLLECTED PAPERS OF MARGARET ARDEN. London: Free Association Books, 1998, 126 pp. (paperback).
Dr. Margaret Arden is an associate member of the Independent Group in the British Psycho-Analytical Society and gravitates toward their openness to ideas from other disciplines. It is her thesis that only receptivity to new ideas can enable a necessary reformulation of Freud's ideas and free psychoanalysis from its nineteenth-century mechanistic Cartesian constrictions. Dr. Arden's goal is psychic truth, and she states it can be found in religion as well as in psychoanalysis, the analyst as midwife to insight, which in her view is symbolically equivalent to religion's enlightenment.
The eight papers that comprise this book begin with a complex, demanding first paper. It is a journey into the thinking of Gregory Bateson (1973) and Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975), both of whom build upon Bertrand Russell's (1903) theory of logical types. Bateson's double-bind thesis arises when verbal and nonverbal components of a communication are contradictory and create confusion. Matte Blanco's ideas on "bi-logic" are close to Freud's primary and secondary process, Arden states that using the mathematics of finite and infinite sets (borrowed from Russell) it is possible to describe "symmetrical" (primary process) and "asymmetrical" (secondary process) thinking. Arden feels these concepts inform our dealing with the clinical situation in new theoretical ways, and she offers a clinical example. She contends that these concepts address the gap between theory and clinical practice. This gap in part arose as a consequence of Strachey's translation of Freud into a more "asymmetrical" English than the more ambiguous original German, which expressed much of Freud's "symmetricality." It is Arden's quest to restore a unity that the "asymmetricality" of "scientific" psychoanalysis is in danger of losing.
The second chapter is no less demanding than the first, adding the concepts of David Bohm (1980), a theoretical physicist and philosopher, "He proposed a systems theory explanation of the nature of the universe which follows from Bateson's notion that mind and evolution are essentially unitary" (p. 26). Bohm coins a new term, "holo-movement," which encompasses his idea that what "is" is movement, and that this concept encompasses the totality of the universe. "Implicate order," a crucial concept formulated by Bohm,...