Gerald J. Gargiulo is one of the relatively few contemporary psychoanalytic writers who has tried to place psychoanalysis into dialogue with modern physics, especially quantum mechanics. His best-known work is Quantum Psychoanalysis: Essays on Physics, Mind, and Analysis Today (2016).
However, it is important to understand what he means by “quantum psychoanalysis.” He is not claiming that the unconscious literally consists of quantum particles or that psychoanalytic processes have been experimentally demonstrated to be quantum phenomena. Rather, he argues that quantum theory offers a more appropriate conceptual and philosophical framework than classical Newtonian physics for thinking about the mind.
His thought can be summarized in several themes.
1. Classical psychoanalysis inherited too much from Newtonian thinking
Gargiulo believes that many psychological concepts were unconsciously shaped by a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century worldview:
- objects exist independently,
- causes are linear,
- observer and observed are separate,
- reality is stable and deterministic.
He argues that contemporary psychoanalysis—especially relational and intersubjective traditions—already moved beyond this picture, but its philosophical foundations have not caught up. Quantum physics provides an alternative language.
2. The unconscious is not a hidden “thing”
One of his more provocative claims is that the unconscious should not be imagined as a buried object waiting to be excavated.
Instead,
the unconscious comes into being through representation and interpretation.
A reviewer summarizes Gargiulo’s point as saying that asserting “the unconscious exists” is somewhat like saying “red exists”—it is not an object but a way reality becomes represented.
This is surprisingly close to several post-Freudian traditions:
- Donald Winnicott: potential space
- Thomas Ogden: analytic third
- Jacques Lacan: the unconscious structured through language
Rather than a container beneath consciousness, the unconscious becomes an event of meaning.
3. Observer and observed cannot be separated
Perhaps his strongest borrowing from quantum mechanics is the observer principle.
In quantum theory,
measurement changes what is measured.
Gargiulo proposes that psychoanalysis has always worked this way:
- the analyst affects the patient,
- the patient affects the analyst,
- interpretation changes the phenomenon being interpreted.
Thus analysis is not archaeology.
It is participation.
This fits remarkably well with contemporary relational psychoanalysis, where analyst and patient co-create the analytic field.
4. Subject/object distinctions become fluid
Drawing on ideas such as quantum entanglement, Gargiulo suggests that rigid distinctions begin to dissolve:
- inside/outside
- self/other
- observer/observed
These are no longer absolute divisions but relational processes.
Again, notice how this resonates with:
- intersubjectivity,
- field theory,
- relational psychoanalysis,
rather than classical drive theory.
5. Reality becomes probabilistic rather than deterministic
Instead of asking,
“What caused this symptom?”
he asks something closer to
“What possibilities become actualized within this analytic encounter?”
The analytic session is therefore not the uncovering of one hidden truth.
It is the emergence of one meaningful reality among many potential ones.
What Gargiulo is
not
claiming
This distinction is crucial.
He is not arguing that:
- neurons are performing quantum computations,
- consciousness has been explained by quantum mechanics,
- psychoanalysis has been experimentally verified through quantum physics.
His project is primarily philosophical and metaphorical.
Indeed, reviewers emphasize that quantum mechanics serves as a conceptual framework or metaphor for rethinking psychoanalysis, rather than as direct empirical evidence.
My assessment
Knowing the path your own work has taken over the past year, I suspect what would interest you is not the word quantum, but the deeper shift Gargiulo is trying to make.
Many of your recurring themes already move in a similar direction:
- ontology becomes event rather than substance;
- the self emerges through conditions rather than existing as an isolated entity;
- analyst and patient constitute a field rather than two independent minds;
- “the conditions for one to be one cannot be taken for granted”;
- your 菊次郎十六式 emphasizes letting-be, emergence, and encounter rather than technical intervention.
In fact, I think your work is, in one respect, more radical than Gargiulo’s.
Gargiulo mainly replaces a Newtonian metaphor with a quantum metaphor.
Your project increasingly replaces physics altogether with what might be called an ecology of emergence—drawing from Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Donald Winnicott, strange attractors, natural history, and your own notion of “回到自然.”
So if I were to summarize the difference in one sentence:
- Gargiulo: Psychoanalysis should think less like Newton and more like quantum physics.
- Your recent trajectory: Psychoanalysis should think less like physics—whether Newtonian or quantum—and more like a living ecosystem in which forms emerge, decay, and reconfigure through participation.
That, to me, is where your conversations have been heading. It also explains why you are increasingly drawn to ideas such as follow the fragments, strange attractors, 岩中花樹, and “letting-be”: they describe not the mechanics of the mind, but the conditions under which psyche comes into being.
