Chaos, Complexity and Emergence Stack

Ego’s idea of order is futile!

Spontaneously emergent stack: Chaos, complexity and emergence theory and its influence on depth psychology. This confluence lies at the crossroads of analytical, archetypal, eco, and neuro psychologies, and the frontier of psychodynamics. Trauma work from the Jungian perspective integrates chaos theory and complexity on both the biological and symbolic psyche levels. They are one. When we can understand image work and its relationship to emergence and self-regulation from a nonlinear, nonlocal vantage point the psyche can be relieved of illusive archetypal hierarchies and old constructs of a false order—the old gods. This rearranging opens the neural networks and bridges the hemispheres of the brain where image and metaphor are the vehicles that move the psyche beyond complexed ego and into an immanent third space where healing can take place. This transcendent function is central to Carl Jung’s work and to leading trauma psychologists such as Peter Levine, Allan Schore, Daniel Siegel, and Donald Kalsched. Previous guest, Marian Dunlea also integrates this overlap in her Body Dreaming approach.

“Clinicians can understand mental health as the preservation of complexity achieved at the edge of chaos. Attention to clinical metaphor represents one important, whole brain technique enabling us to integrate left-with right–brain processes while blending the known with the unknown, and body experience with mental images, feelings with words, Unconscious with conscious aspects. Fractal geometry appears to be an important source for new models and metaphors within clinical theory and practice. Fractal geometry is the geometry of nature which, due to open borders between world, self and other, applies as much to human psychological nature as to material processes and substrates, and acts as a bridge. Self-similarity represents a newly discovered symmetry in nature. In this symmetry of identity, nature’s parts carry fingerprints of her wholes. Applied to psyche, properties of scale-invariance and self-similarity help us to find great meaning in tiny moments as well as to detect ordered patterns in the disorder we face. Out of the nonlinear coupling of two brains, bodies, heart, minds and souls fused together, healing in the form of greater complexity can arise spontaneously and unpredictably in both.

The highly nonlinear nature both of psychotherapy and it’s underlying brain processes means that formularized methods based on reductionistic assumptions have severe limitations. While pointing towards important global principles, by reducing the complexity of the whole they are bound to fail as precise algorithms for specific actions. Nonlinear science is a science of wholeness, and within the context of the hole, being appears more important than doing. At neurobiological levels the brain alters in response to implicit emotional changes arising from beyond our conscious capabilities. This highlights the importance of clinical intuition based on emergent aspects of the moment. Within therapists, I have come to believe that the nonlinear emergence of novelty out of attention to the whole enables highest creativity within the blending of science, art, and spirit during the practice psychotherapy.”