“Leon and the chess game with death.” ‘Trauma playing on the set of complexity’

This paper aims to explore the theory of complexity as a meta-theoretical framework of the intrinsic connection and interpenetration of complex systems across a wide range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis. The therapeutic relationship between patient and analyst is, in fact, a bi-personal system generated by an interaction dependent on context. It moves between order and randomness, characterized by dynamism, non-linearity, adaptability, self-organization, and unpredictability. Metaphors and images fall within the framework of the theory of complexity. It is a system that operates between the explicit domain and the implicit domain, characterized by indeterminacy, non-linearity, and emerging perturbing elements. It interacts tirelessly, in the relationship on that unstable thread of self-organization in the magical and unstoppable phenomenon of change. Metaphorical language facilitates both declarative and implicit dialogue in the therapeutic relationship, promoting connections with alternative realities to the one story the patients believe in, allowing them to emancipate themselves from the conviction that there is only one reality. The clinical story described in this work is a magical weave that intertwines the fabric of complexity and the play of metaphors, in the dance painted by patient and analyst. Two emerging subjectivities, whose traumatic stories and changing context, become the canvas that unfolds in shared time.