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ABSTRACT
Complexity theory, also called dynamical self-organizing systems theory, is a new scientific way of viewing the natural world. It is being applied to a vast range of multiply determined systems, as well as to created systems including psychoanalysis, and in this article to analytically informed group therapy. Examples of prominent features of group therapy lend themselves to comparison with outstanding features of complexity systems, including nonlinear determinism, self-organization, coevolution, and disequilibrium conditions for change and growth. Examples are used throughout to illustrate inferred processes called cascading multisubjectivity, and asynchronous change processes. Therapist role indications are in the direction of implementing the group's own processes of creating change, at close range in the sessions.
Until the present, analytic group psychotherapy, along with its mother theory psychoanalysis, has developed in all its clinical acuteness and gifted conceptions in magnificent isolation from outside scientific influence and connection. There has been one notable scientific exception, General Systems Theory. Classical behavioral conditioning concepts were purportedly built up in the older positivistic scientific tradition from presumed basics in controlled animal learning studies. These concepts have made a much more visible imprint on cognitive and programmed behavior therapies than on psychodynamic approaches. Now, of two major contemporary influences from outside the field, one is not scientific. That is post-modern literary/philosophical, textual/interpretive deconstructionism (Gergen, 1999). The other, self-organizing dynamical systems theory, also called complexity theory, is a scientific model being applied in many fields of inquiry. It is beginning to inform psychoanalysis (Palombo, 1999). It also just beginning to have its impact, on general psychological views of human organization including group therapy (Masterpasqua & Perna, 1997).
Dynamical systems theory is Chaos Theory (Gleick, 1987) applied to adaptive systems (Holland, 1995; Kauffman, 1995). Poincare originated this body of thought and inference; specifically, he did it in his mathematics of systems generated by differential equations where changes in the values of a set of variables change the values of other variables (Ekelund, 1988). Ongoing computer simulations of systems that evolve (Holland 1995; Kellert, 1993) have hugely augmented modeling of complexity systems. Studies of adaptive living systems came together in the Santa Fe Institute, founded in the late 1980s principally by the Nobelist Gell-Mann and also by Kauffman.
Chaos Theory is not about...