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Helene Shulman, a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zürich, has written a fascinating and important book for anybody interested in the way complex systems function. ‘Complex systems’ can refer to an ecosystem, a political party, a computer programme, the Tao, a family, a hospital ward or any other ‘open’ system, of which an individual is perhaps the most important example. The book opens with Shulman's observations of the implicit and explicit systems at work on a mental health ward treating schizophrenic patients; and, from that first-hand experience, she moves outwards - or inwards - to contemplate and synthesize the compelling but surprising results of the World Health Organization research into the efficacy of healing rituals and practices amongst peoples in the developing world when treating behaviour and symptoms which would be classified as schizophrenic in DSM-IV, the standard manual of classification of mental health disorders in America.
The book moves into a highly challenging gear as Shulman explores the phenomena associated with the capacity to evolve adaptive systems, particularly at the point of ‘phase transition’, as a system moves from order to chaos to order. (Although she does not mention it in the text, I thought of the movement between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions which I have seen depicted as ps ↔ dp.) Shulman introduces and then uses to great effect the grid which was presented originally in Mary Douglas's book, Natural Symbols, adapting the grid - or using it - as a lens through which she investigates the polarities of structure/liminality and bounded/unbound social systems as well as the phase transitions of water (with reference to the ‘closed’ system analysis of Newtonian physics), psychic self-organization and the Unus Mundus. To quote from the jacket: ‘A new paradigm for postmodern psychology emerges as the author presents a dynamic theoretical model containing rational and irrational aspects of individual and collective