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Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis.

Article Excerpt
Brothers, Doris (2008). Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis. New York: The Analytic Press / Taylor and Francis group, 223 pages, ISBN 0-13:978-0-88163-478-5 (softcover).

Reviewed by Edwin L. Hersch, author of From Philosophy to Psychotherapy: A Phenomenological Model for Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysts.

In Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty Doris Brothers develops three key premises. These are:

1) Regarding relationality: "Experiences of existential uncertainty emerge from, and are emotionally transformed within, relational systems." (p. x).,

2) Regarding trauma: "By destroying the certainties that pattern psychological life, trauma plunges a relational system into chaos and exposes its victims to experiences of unbearable uncertainty." And ..."trauma represents exile from a world of hope." (p. x).,

3) Regarding treatment: There is a "mutual need of both patient and therapist to transform experiences of intolerable uncertainty." (p. xi).

I will, proceed in a chapter by chapter manner to look at how she deals primarily with these themes.

In Chapter one, "The Laboratory and the Labyrinth," Doris Brothers talks about various philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in ways which challenge the classical Freudian, but also Cartesian, [and I'd add 'Modernist'] view which sees the consulting room as a sort of "laboratory" where values of neutrality and objectivity allow us to examine, and sometimes manipulate, variables while largely divorced from their life-context. She calls this view "positivist" and sees its goal as achieving general or universal truths about human psychology. In that approach one correct answer is sought and theories battle out which is "the right way" to proceed to get "the right answer." In other words, the promise of a certain, clear and unambiguous answer is postulated and sought. Brothers contends that unlike this laboratory metaphor that of the "labyrinth" is likely more appropriate to our purposes. A labyrinth is described as "a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths" (p. 16) and is distinguished from a "maze" in that the former allows for more than one correct solution, while the latter does not. In drawing on a variety of philosophical and psychoanalytic sources she argues that our lives are filled with uncertainties, ambiguities, and on-going incomplete dynamic processes and systems. Thus, we need a psychology of uncertainty to deal with these. She also draws upon relational psychoanalytic theories as well as "relational systems theory" (e.g., quoting Thelen...

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