Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This work is a continuation of a previous publication where I tried to explain what I have called the basal structure, which represents the foundations on which personality is built and the bases on which health and psychopathology rest in their various expressions. Starting from the idea of basal structures, we have expanded the knowledge towards what are called attractor states, a concept that comes from physics and mathematics, linked to chaos theory and non-linear dynamic complex systems. An attractor state is a set to which a dynamic system evolves from different initial conditions. From the psychoanalytic point of view, we can think of attractors that lead a person’s system to its origin or to certain anchor points of their personality. At certain moments, the attractor can lead the person to a healthy or pathological basal structure, as if attracted by a gravitational force. In other cases, we consider that the attractor is active, even if it is in the background. We start with the idea of the multiplicity of the self, but we understand that not all selves carry the same weight in each person. We are proposing that the psychotherapist helps the patient to know and engage in dialogue with their attractors and their different selves, whenever possible.
Authors: Institut Català Winnicott, Francesc Sainz Bermejo
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410028121