RESPONSE

Is Physics Really a Good Model for Psychoanalysis?Reflections on Langs and Badalamenti

Joseph Schwartz

Langs and Badalamenti (1994a) have given us a provocative account of their preliminaryefforts to quantify the means by which therapists and clients express themselves in apsychoanalytic session. Using videotaped recordings of psychoanalytic consultationsoriginally prepared for a teaching conference on how analysts work, Langs andBadalamenti have scored successive 8 second intervals* of the sessions according to fivevariables: how new is the material under discussion (newness of thematic material); towhat extent a story is being told as opposed to generalisations being offered (extent ofnarration versus intellectualisation); to what extent the material is discussed in positivetones; to what extent in negative tones; and how halting or continuous the dialogue is.

In this way Langs and Badalamenti assemble a large database consisting of tendifferent time series, five for therapist and five for client. They approach their data in anumber of different ways.

By calculating a standard statistical measure, the cross correlation between the timeseries of client and therapist, Langs and Badalamenti obtain measures of who followswhom in the session: if the therapist becomes more positively toned does the clientfollow? If the client becomes more positively toned does the therapist follow? In thissample of sessions the strongest correlations were observed in newness of theme, extent ofnarration and negative tone. The variances of these variables were also the largest. In twostrongly experienced sessions the correlations in these variables along with their varianceswere both quite high, suggesting an attunement model of strong sessions where client andtherapist are closely attuned (high correlations), and this attunement produces a widerange (large variance) of emotional response and newness of theme (spontaneity), allpossible characteristics of what could be experienced as a strong session. Otherinterpretations are of course possible.

A second approach deals with just one of the time series, the continuity of dialogue.Here Langs and Badalamenti appear to have replicated a well-known effect inpsychological linguistics - that the sound-silence patterns in monologues or dialogueswhen sampled at durations even as short as 300 milliseconds are well described by a typeof coupled Poisson process, called a first order Markov chain, in which the distribution ofboth the lengths of utterances and of silences are decreasing exponentials (Jaffe et al.1964). This is a worthwhile finding but its interpretation needs to be handled carefully.

*Although it appears that they have also used for part of their analysis one second scoring intervals aswell.

Joseph Schwartz PhD is a member of the Institute of Self Analysis Centre for Attachment BasedPsychoanalytic Psychotherapy, London. He is currently writing a history of psychoanalysis forHamish Hamilton. Address for correspondence: 2 Lancaster Drive, London NW3 4HA.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 11(4), 1995© The author

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obtained by calibration with a previously known force or by interference from a knowledgeof the shape of the orbit, the experimental observation of acceleration is only that, anacceleration. Calling their observed accelerations forces (by setting m=1 thus giving F=a)obscures the analysis and leads them to make claims that are unsupported by the data.

First, there is no evidence for a 'communicative or informational force field', `a deepand natural force of nature'. All that Langs and Badalamenti have measured are time ratesof change of their scored variables. They may choose to hypothesise that the motion oftheir constructed vector is due to a force field (although it is far from clear what a forcefield in their constructed five-dimensional space would mean). But the mere observation ofan acceleration is not evidence for the existence of a force field. A child running about in aplayground has numerous accelerations and decelerations. But that does not mean thatthere is a playground force field that drives the motion of the child over time.

Similarly, Langs and Badalamenti are in error in thinking that their calculation of theintegral of the acceleration A through distance is the work. One needs independentexpressions in order to calculate the work done by an external force. What they havecalculated with this integral is the quantity K=1/2V2 which in classical mechanics is thekinetic energy of a particle of unit mass. However, as I noted above it is quite interestingthat the quantity AK/At=A•V is the same for every 8 second interval. For one dimensionalmotion the Langs-Badalamenti relationship says that the acceleration is inverselyproportional to the velocity and, as such, that the velocity of a particle depends on thesquare root of the elapsed time. However in a five-dimensional space the Langs-Badalamenti relationship is not sufficient to define the motion since there are fourremaining variables to be specified. It will be interesting to see whether the Langs-Badalamenti relationship holds up and what meaning can be ascribed to it.

One further result is that a plot of the motion of the vector R shows that the vectornever moves through the origin and is confined to an ellipsoidal surface. This presumablymeans that the values of the five variables satisfy the relationship (a1x1)2+...+(a5x5)2=1where the a's are constants. Such a relationship could mean that the five variables are notindependent of each other.* But Langs and Badalamenti are in error when they tentativelypropose as an explanation of this finding that Nature favours elliptical trajectories e.g. therotation of the planets around the sun and the paths travelled by an electron'. Theapproximately elliptical planetary orbits are the evidence for Newton's inverse square lawof gravitation. Other forces, in general, do not produce ellipses. As for electrons, theessence of the quantum mechanical revolution rests on the fact that electrons do not travelin paths at all. They spread out (wave property) so that in the case of electron diffraction,for example, they go through two separated slits at the same time (Feynman 1963, pp. 1.1-1.11).

Langs and Badalamenti also approach their data with language drawn fromthermodynamics. However there is a conceptual error here in that the same set of datapoints consisting of the values of the five variables sampled over successive 8 secondintervals cannot be evidence both for a mechanical law that assumes a continuity of the

*For example, it is difficult to see how a speaker could be highly positively toned and highlynegatively toned at the same time. It would seem that when one of these variables is high then theother must be low. Thus some of the points within the 5-cube can never be occupied.

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motion of R and for a thermodynamic law that rests on an assumption of random motion.What can we make of these preliminary results then? I am among those who are put

off both by what I consider to be the bullying, disrespectful tone of the Langs/Badalamentiarticle and by the authors' lack of restraint in stating their conclusions. Can the authorsreally believe that they have achieved results similar to those of Newton, Faraday,Maxwell and Einstein?

However, as Peter Fonagy has remarked [this issue, p. 591 - Ed.], even though weknow that there is no answer, we still need people to stand up and say that they have theanswer. Langs and Badalamenti have their own style. I do not go for it myself. But it is arecognisable style. A recent survey of `scientists and physicians given to flamboyantaccounts of their work and those who prefer a more modest account or tellingunderstatement' indicates that over the last 30 years there has been a marked increase inflamboyance in the reporting of research results (MacDermot 1994). Overstatement is asign of the times, a sign that researchers have become increasingly isolated (Schwartz1992).

Langs and Badalamenti have written a piece for an audience whom they have reasonto expect to be hostile. So even though I would join with Harris (1994) in her critique ofLangs and Badalamenti, particularly that their work is a flight into physics, there is in theirpaper a fundamental question of clinical practice to be addressed as well as the basicquestion of how we are to develop methods that can help us resolve issues of principle.Langs and Badalamenti have opted for mathematical modelling along the lines of physics.But even if this is not the way forward, we still need to engage Langs and Badalamenti ifwe are not to fall into a defensive complacency about our present understandings ofmental health, clinical practice and human subjective experience.

What informs Langs's work is his long-standing concern about facilitating unconsciouscommunication in therapy. The present study is meant to move outside the standardclinical report in order to address `the dread in both patients and therapists of bothunconscious meaning and of validated, stable, secured ground rules or frames'. I believethere can be few therapists who have not felt challenged by Langs's techniques rangingfrom whole sessions of complete silence on the part of the therapist to Langs's insistencethat fees should not be raised throughout the course of an analysis. And within the presentstudy certainly the most interesting fording is the measure that indicates the presence ofwhat Langs and Badalamenti call therapist dominance, the therapist interrupting the clientin a way that decreased the `unconscious meaning in their patients' associations'.

I do not wish to engage these questions in a substantive way in this paper exceptbriefly to disagree in order to clarify the issues. For me Langs seems to reify theunconscious - to turn a mental process, the unconscious, into a thing - while at the sametime his technique seems to me to have the danger of leaving the client isolated and in ananxious, persecuted state. But then, coming from a Sullivanian tradition I would say that,wouldn't I? The question is how can we constructively resolve theoretical and clinicaldifferences such as these? Are mathematical models the way forward? I would argue theyare not.

Langs and Badalamenti share a view about natural science that has been increasinglydiscarded over the last 20 years. There is now a large critical literature in the history ofscience (Fleck 1935, Forman 1984, Galison 1987), the sociology of science (Latour &Woolgar 1979, Pickering 1984, Aronowitz 1988) and philosophy of

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science (Young 1977, Rorty 1979, MacKenzie 1981) that looks at scientific understandingas a social activity created by human effort. Against this Langs and Badalamenti (1994b)say:

Our main point is this: when a scientist hones a quantitative instrument with which he or she in anew and novel way goes to nature without distorting bias or prejudice and allows nature to speakfor itself... it is our responsibility to comprehend these results and in time integrate them into ourthinking, theory and clinical practice.

I do not believe it possible any longer to sustain this view of allowing `nature to speak foritself'. Nature is mute. Galileo's telescope showed four blurred specks of light. Who was tosay what they meant?

Our understandings of our experiences of nature are created, not discovered. And thesocial processes that result in the creation of the scientific literature, among whose gemsare the great laws of physics, are full of conflict, polemic and ostracisation, processes thatare not unknown in the field of psychoanalysis. So if the intent of introducingmathematical modelling into the analysis of a psychoanalytic session is to create aninstrument that will command instant agreement, I do not believe that this will happen.Mathematics is no more an objective language than is English, as much as one might wishit to be so.

But there is an even more fundamental problem in Langs and Badalamenti's choice ofphysics as a model for a successful psychoanalysis. Langs and Badalamenti say, quiterightly in my opinion, that a science of emotional cognition is a branch of biology. Butthey then proceed to use the metaphors of physics in their analysis.

There is a long and unsuccessful history of attempts to reduce the various levels ofbiological phenomena to physics. But the successes of molecular biology have shown, Ithink conclusively, that the various levels of the organisation of matter have emergentproperties that must be understood in their own terms (Anderson 1972). The double helixis not a mathematical model in any sense that the models of physics are mathematicalmodels. The puzzle that informed the work of Max Delbrück's famous Phage Group,where James Watson learned his trade, was to understand how a bacterial phage (virus)attached itself to a bacterium and after a half an hour produced 100 copies of itself.Among the many successes of molecular biology, of which the double helix is only one,was an elucidation of the step-by-step process by which a virus replicates itself. Themystery of life, at least its replication, solved. No mathematics.

As much as one may strain to place the achievements of molecular biology (or ofgeology or palaeontology or evolutionary biology) as examples similar to the successes ofphysics, they are not physics. Physics deals only with the timeless measurable propertiesof matter, matter without a history. As Max Delbruck (1949) said 50 years ago:

On the whole the successful theories of biology have been and are still today simple and concrete.Presumably this is not accidental but is bound up with the fact that every biological phenomenonis essentially an historical one, an unique situation in the infinite total complex of life.

Such a situation diminishes the hope of understanding any one living thing by itself and the hopeof discovering universal laws, the pride and ambition of physicists. The curiosity remains thoughto grasp more clearly how the same matter, which in physics and chemistry displays orderly,reproducible and relatively simple properties, arranges itself in the most astounding fashions assoon as it is drawn into the orbit of living organisms. The closer one

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looks at these performances of matter in living organisms the more impressive the show becomes.The meanest living cell becomes a magic puzzle box full of elaborate and changing molecules,and far outstrips all chemical laboratories of man in the skill of organic synthesis performed withease, expedition and good judgement of balance. The complex accomplishment of any one livingcell is part and parcel of the first-mentioned feature, that any one cell represents more anhistorical than a physical event. These complex things do not arise every day by spontaneousgeneration from non-living matter - if they did they would really be reproducible and timelessphenomena, comparable to the crystallisation of a solution and would belong to the subject matterof physics proper. No, any living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years ofexperimentation by its ancestors. You cannot expect to explain so wise an old bird in a few simplewords. (pp. 10-11)

Research in the past four decades has proved Delbruck right. The dreams of themathematical biologists have evaporated as the detailed concrete pictures of molecularprocesses in the living cell have piled up. Life, while certainly being more than a sack ofenzymes under the control of a master molecule, is also certainly not a Poisson process.

For years biologists were called mere stamp collectors by practitioners of the so-calledhard sciences. In the 1930s, the grant givers at the Rockefeller Foundation felt that orderwould not be brought to biology until it adopted the mathematical techniques of physics (Olby 1974). But molecular biology has proved that the successful theories in biology are infact simple and concrete. We see the molecular aspects of life processes very clearly now.But we see them in terms of detailed steps, as descriptions, not as highly general, abstractlaws, mathematically expressed.

I think the successes of molecular biology show that we have good reasons to doubtthe efficacy of applying the mathematical methods of physics to living systems. Presum-ably this would include the psychoanalytic session. Of course one should always expectsurprises, but I believe that the history of failures in this area indicates that matter at highlevels of complexity cannot be understood in the same terms as the simpler levels of whichthey are composed. As Anderson (1972) says: `More is different'. Based on past experienceI would predict that nothing will come of the quantification of the videotaped sessions thatcannot be seen by viewing the sessions themselves.

In the meantime, how can we engage in a principled discussion of differences in thetechniques and theory? Perhaps CD-ROMs would let us write articles using excerpts fromvideotaped sessions to show what we mean, or as evidence of the kinds of things therapistsdo that might be considered good or bad practice. But of course this is what good writingis supposed to do: communicate accurately the character and meaning of humaninteraction. This is where psychoanalysis borders on literature, where it requires the skillsof the novelist in its rendering of reality and the skills of the scientist in understanding it.

I believe it is a mistake to try to cast psychoanalysis in the image of physics not leastbecause this image is almost entirely fictional. The problem facing psychoanalysis is notwhether it needs to be `more' of a science but whether, as David Smith (1995) has beencalling for, we can develop ways to engage each other about issues of mutual concern thatcan advance the field.

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Delbruck, M. (1949) A physicist looks at biology. In Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology (Eds. J. Cairns, G.S. Stent and J. Watson). Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring HarborLaboratory, 1966.

Feynman, R.P., Leighton, R.B. & Sands, M. (1963) The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Vol. III,Quantum Mechanics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

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Forman, P. (1984) Kausalitat, Anschaulichkeit, and Individualitut, or how cultural values prescribedthe character and lessons ascribed to quantum mechanics. In Society and Knowledge:Contemporary Perspectives in the Sociology of Knowledge (Eds. N. Stehr and V. Meja). NewBrunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

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