Review of A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology: Bridging the Personal with the Transpersonal: edited by Terry Marks-Tarlow, Yakov Shapiro, Katthe P. Wolf, and Harris L. Friedman, Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020, ISBN-10: 1-5275-4023-5, ISBN-13: 978-1-5275-4023-1

Introduction: Background Context

Books do not arise from a vacuum. In that context, the relevance of this potentially groundbreaking book to clinical, conceptual and ethical issues of central importance to our Self Psychology community could not have been fully appreciated without an inquiry into the dialogic history that lead to its emergence.†

The story begins with the work and thought of Terry-Marks-Tarlow, the lead editor and author of both the lead chapter that sets the table for the other chapters and a chapter on application of her fractal sensibilities to her clinical work. She is a multi-talented woman-experienced psychotherapist, author of four books and numerous papers/chapters, a visual artist and composer of a libretto. Since the 1980s she had been fascinated with the wonder and mystery of fractals both in nature and in its mathematical modeling, a fascination that culminated in the publication of her first book, Psyche’s Veil. (2008). In that book, Marks-Tarlow explored the clinical applications of chaos theory, complexity theory, and fractal geometry. Furthermore, Marks-Tarlow considers the latter three theories as interconnected components of non-linear science that she depicts as follows:

I draw primarily from three areas of contemporary science most relevant to clinicians-chaos theory, complexity theory, and fractal geometry. Chaos theory grounds us in the inevitable turmoil, discontinuities, and limited predictability of ordinary life. Complexity theory reveals how development, new order, and creative change self organize, spontaneously emerging at the edge of chaos. Fractal geometry detects complex patterns of the whole as they extend through a system’s parts, including paradoxical boundaries, simultaneously open and closed, bounded and unbounded. Taken together these sciences, model the deep interpenetration between self, world, and other. (Marks-Tarlow, 2008, p. 4)

Marks-Tarlow therefore specifies fractal geometry as the mathematical language that