The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process

As I stated in my previous post, the second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is the Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders.

 

The focus of this post is Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process.

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTER

Chapter 14 explores the question: What does complexity have to say about healing and therapeutic process?

While historical texts on healing can be found across all cultures, the emergence of therapy as a specific technique for healing has a distinct history. In terms of the complexity sciences, our story begins in the 1950s with family systems theory and with the application of dynamical systems theory to therapy.

 

While theories of the family are endemic to social science, a systems view is distinct, getting its start when Gregory Bateson applied systems thinking to family communication patterns, thereby developing a systems approach to family therapy. Other key figures of the time were Jay Haley and John Weakland – who also worked on the Bateson project – as well as such pioneering scholars as Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Mara Selvini Palazzoli. Palazzoli developed the Milan model of family systems therapy,[1] which she later applied to schools, hospitals, and corporations. Theodore Lidz and colleagues,[2] advocating for the role of environmental factors, examined how schizophrenia emerges out of dysfunctional or pathological environments and emphasized – rightly so, as it still remains the case – that while biological models and psychopharmacology are of value, therapy, particularly family systems, is incredibly successful. Other major schools of thought include the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute, structural family therapy, and the intergenerational therapies of Murray Bowen, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, and James Framo, which explore how the pathology of family life is passed down across generations.[3]

 

Somewhat distinct from family systems theory – but certainly in concert with its ‘systems’ view of psychopathology, including the role of familial and contextual forces, as well as the importance of social interaction, particularly between a therapist and client – is the formal application of dynamical systems theory to therapy. This approach starts with the complexity turn in social science. Here the heavy emphasis is on the value of dynamical systems theory, as a set of methodological tools, for modelling and doing therapy. While this includes a variety of computational modelling approaches, including simulation, genetic algorithms and complex networks, it is primarily grounded in the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. As readers may recall, the Swiss psychologist, Wolfgang Tschacher was (and remains) a key figure in application of dynamical systems theory to therapy.[4] Starting in the 1990s with his work on time and self-organisation, and then continuing onward to the study of embodiment and synchrony in the therapeutic process, Tschacher has been pivotal to the field’s development. Later, in the early aughties, he began working with Hermann Haken on the application of synergetics (a theory of nonlinear complex systems) to the dynamics of cognition, psychology and therapy[5] – all points we will get to later. Another key figure is the American psychologist, Adele Hayes. In particular is her 1998 publication, “Dynamic systems theory as a paradigm for the study of change in psychotherapy: an application to cognitive therapy for depression”.[6] Her work is central to the development of a dynamical systems approach to change in therapy, with particular emphasis on cognitive-behavioural therapy, associative networks, system flexibility, destabilization of pathological patterns, and the development of new patterns or attractors. Other key scholars include John Mordechai Gottman,[7] Helmut Schöller,[8] Fred Hasselman,[9] Günter Schiepek[10] and David Pincus.[11]

Despite their significant differences, these scholars (be they family systems theory or otherwise) variously embrace the following assumptions about the healing and therapeutic process. For our review, we will constrain ourselves to the therapeutic process, as the variety of settings and situations in which mental health healing takes place would require a level of detail beyond what we can address here. The majority of the literature also tends to focus on therapy (be it in an office, clinic, or hospital) as it provides a somewhat controlled setting for exploring the healing and therapeutic process.

 

Here are the topics we review in the chapter:

• the role of time in healing
• how therapy takes place within complex social systems
• the dynamics, nonlinearities, initial conditions and feedback loops in the therapeutic process
• embodiment and synchrony in therapy
• therapeutic process as both stochastic and deterministic
• self-organisation and attractors
• the stability of mental disorders
• how therapy is both time varying and time-invariant; symptom targeting; and therapeutic synergetics.

 

 

 

KEY WORDS: Synergetics in therapy, dynamical systems theory, synchrony in therapy, family systems theory, family therapy, psychotherapy.

 

 

 

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[1] Boscolo, Luigi, Gianfranco Cecchin, Lynn Hoffman, and Peggy Penn. Milan systemic family therapy: Conversations in theory and practice. Basic Books, 1987.

[2] Lidz, Theodore. "Schizophrenia and the family." Psychiatry 21, no. 1 (1958): 21-27.

[3] See footnote 4. See also Sexton, T. L., & Lebow, J. (Eds.). Handbook of family therapy. Routledge 2016.

[4] Wolfgang Tschacher, ‘Time and Embodiment in the Process of Psychotherapy: A Dynamical Systems Perspective’, in Time and Body, ed. Christian Tewes and Giovanni Stanghellini, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 104–16.

[5] Wolfgang Tschacher and Hermann Haken, ‘Causation and Chance: Detection of Deterministic and Stochastic Ingredients in Psychotherapy Processes’, Psychotherapy Research 30, no. 8 (16 November 2020): 1075–87.

[6] Adele M. Hayes and Jennifer L. Strauss, ‘Dynamic Systems Theory as a Paradigm for the Study of Change in Psychotherapy: An Application to Cognitive Therapy for Depression.’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66, no. 6 (1998): 939.

[7] Gottman, John M., et al. The mathematics of marriage: Dynamic nonlinear models. MIT Press, 2005.

[8] Schöller, Helmut, et al. "Personality development in psychotherapy: a synergetic model of state-trait dynamics." Cognitive Neurodynamics 12 (2018): 441-459.

[9] Hasselman, Fred, and Anna MT Bosman. "Studying complex adaptive systems with internal states: A recurrence network approach to the analysis of multivariate time-series data representing self-reports of human experience." Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics 6 (2020): 9.

[10] Schiepek, Günter K., et al. "Psychotherapy is chaotic—(not only) in a computational world." Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 379.

[11] Pincus, David, and Annette Metten. "Nonlinear dynamics in biopsychosocial resilience." Nonlinear dynamics, psychology, and life sciences 14, no. 4 (2010): 353.