Living Systems, Evolving Consciousness, and the Emerging Person: Selected Papers from Louis Sander's Life Work | Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series | 1st Edition Hardcover (2007) | Essential for Psychoanalysis Students & Mental Health Professionals

This collection of previously published papers can be viewed as a story of the gradual emergence of an overarching idea through the course of a life's work. The idea is one that describes an essential principle of process for living systems - that there is a continuing impetus, both energizing and motivational, that moves the system toward enhanced coherence in its engagement with its surround as it achieves increasing inclusiveness of complexity. The papers have been selected from a career of developmental research within the framework of psychoanalytic thinking. One might say they represent an outcome of a search for basic principles governing life as an ongoing creative process. As principles they should be found to be operative at each and every level of complexity in living systems - from that of the single-cell organism to the organization of human consciousness. Hopefully, the implications of this idea will emerge in the reader's thinking while he or she goes through the papers. The sequence of papers is an example of the emerging complexity in Sander's thinking over many decades. It was a thinking that began with his struggle to integrate in some real way a simple rural childhood, that had generated a deep devotion to, and fascination with, the wonders of nature that he had grown up within - with the deeper actualities of the structure and function of the anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology of the human body, brain, and mind that he encountered at the clinical level. As time went on, he became aware that an ever-present background to this ongoing task was the emergence of his own integrative core - his "self". The underlying impetus to pursue this open-ended, bumpy trajectory were the dim but endless "but, who am I," "who do I want to be," and, "what difference does it make?"