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This comprehensive volume is a wide-ranging collection of readings about complexity theory. The authors set out to illustrate how complexity theory can deepen and broaden neurobiological and psychological theories of the mind. Each of the six chapters is written by a different scholar with a different area of expertise. A useful glossary is included for those unfamiliar with nonlinear dynamics.
In chapter 1, Stanley Palombo suggests that complexity theory is the parent science of psychoanalysis. According to complexity theory, a living system evolves through an integrating series of reorganizations that raise it to new levels of structure and function. The psychoanalytic process promotes the self-organizing properties of the ideas and feelings that make up the contents of the patient's mind. All living things self-organize into patterns, and that cannot be predicted by the usual mathematical analysis. These patterns interact in dynamic ways responding to internal and environmental conditions.
The therapeutic process that frees the patient to respond optimally to the world is itself highly complex in intricate and often very delicate ways. A major aspect of all complex systems is that a relatively small change in input from the environment can lead to a major reorganization. In treatment small changes can affect the patient's mental structure at a level of increased complexity. Sudden and surprising changes in a patient during analysis are evidence of phase changes in the structure of his mental contents. Phase changes occur in all complex systems; this is sometimes called the “edge of chaos.” In the clinical situation, the edge of chaos is encountered when the analyst intervenes to open new pathways to the disconnected aspect of the patient's mental content. New learning occurs in adaptive systems on the edge of chaos, between the dangers of stagnation and disorganization.
In chapter 2, Walter J. Freeman summarizes a biological theory of brain function and its relev