Complexity Theory

Siegel (2012b) describes picking up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual … he realizes that they can all be understood as states of disintegration, with health being the state of integration/self-regulation … the use of complex systems theory to describe self-organization parallels the current psychopathological view of self-regulation

This passage argues that complexity theory's concept of self-organization is functionally equivalent to psychopathology's concept of self-regulation, enabling a unified reading of DSM diagnostic categories as states of integrative failure — chaos or rigidity — rather than discrete disease entities.

Winhall, Jan, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis

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Complexity theory comes from a branch of mathematics, and in the true spirit of consilience, it has been applied to many different fields … complex systems have an innate self-organizing capacity

This passage situates complexity theory within a broad consilient movement and grounds its clinical relevance in the principle that complex systems possess an innate self-organizing capacity directly applicable to therapeutic work with trauma and addiction.

Winhall, Jan, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis

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The brain is a complex system whose processes organize its functioning. That is, a complex system has an 'emergent property' that arises from the interaction of its basic constituents. This property is called 'self-organization.'

Siegel establishes the brain as a nonlinear dynamical complex system whose defining emergent property — self-organization — provides the foundational conceptual bridge between neurobiological description and psychological theory of mind.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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'Emergence … occurs only when the activities of the parts do not simply sum to give the activity of the whole.' … Reynolds' basic idea was to place a large collection of autonomous, birdlike agents … none of them said, 'Form a flock.'

Bosnak draws directly on emergence literature from the Santa Fe complexity tradition to argue that the multiplicity of autonomous subjectivities in embodied imagination constitutes an emergent property that cannot be derived from the sum of its constituent imaginative elements.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis

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integration creates coherence by enabling the mind's flow of information and energy to achieve a balance in its movement toward maximizing complexity … the system moves between sameness and rigidity

Siegel proposes that psychological integration is the mind's self-organizational movement toward maximal complexity, positioning the dynamics of chaos and rigidity as the two pathological poles that complexity-theoretic thinking allows clinicians to diagnose and address.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple

McGilchrist inverts the conventional ontological hierarchy by asserting that complexity is the universal ground state of reality, while simplicity is an artificial and partial abstraction — a philosophical provocation with direct implications for how psychological models should be constructed.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple

A parallel formulation to the above, reinforcing McGilchrist's ontological argument that the direction of dependence runs from complexity to simplicity rather than the reverse, challenging reductionist assumptions embedded in scientific modelling.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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the growing ascendancy of systems theory, complexity theory, and chaos theory with their focus on ever-shifting networks of relationship, nonlinear dynamics, and the complex interdependence of living systems

Tarnas reads the rise of complexity theory, alongside systems theory and chaos theory, as an expression of a specific archetypal configuration in intellectual history, situating these scientific developments within a participatory cosmological framework.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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the patterns that are beginning to emerge from studies of chaotic dynamics bear an intriguing resemblance to those Jung described. Produced by complex dynamics, they are difficult to describe. They look a lot like symbols.

Ulanov identifies a structural homology between the patterns produced by complex dynamic systems and Jung's symbolic thinking, arguing that chaos and complexity mathematics inadvertently reconverges on the territory of depth psychology.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting

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As chaotic dynamics stretch and fold in on themselves, leading to closed curves that both loop around in unpredictable ways and connect every point on the attractor with every other … Self-Organizing Chaos … science's attempt to come up with a precise and specifiable theory to describe how chaos occurs.

This passage situates self-organizing chaos within mathematical description of strange attractors and fractal dynamics, providing the technical scaffolding for Ulanov's broader argument about the formal convergence between complexity mathematics and Jungian symbolic theory.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting

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'we see a universe evolving from less to more structured, from equilibrium to complexity': This is certainly not the picture a naïve application of the second law of thermodynamics would suggest.

McGilchrist invokes cosmological evidence of increasing structural complexity to challenge entropy-based reductionism, arguing that living and nonliving complex open systems exhibit a tendency that complexity theory must account for against the grain of classical thermodynamics.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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'we see a universe evolving from less to more structured, from equilibrium to complexity': This is certainly not the picture a naïve application of the second law of thermodynamics would suggest.

A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist's cosmological claim that complexity theory must grapple with the universe's demonstrable tendency toward greater structure, resisting entropy-centric interpretations.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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the inherent features of computation, complexity, and connectionism create a property of cohesion within a state of mind in a given slice of time … the complex systems of our minds are capable of abrupt transitions into markedly different states

Siegel links the complexity-theoretic properties of computation and connectionism to the phenomenology of self-states, explaining both cohesion within states and abrupt discontinuous transitions between them as features of the mind's complex-system dynamics.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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for life to proceed from simplicity to complexity, a system must move beyond simple replication, and with this evolution comes the creation of dissipative structures

Conforti draws on Jantsch's thermodynamic framework to argue that evolutionary movement from simplicity to complexity requires dissipative structures — a conceptual link between complexity theory and the psyche's developmental trajectory.

Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting

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Chaos complexity and, 98 … integration and, 16–17, 16f, 22, 35, 342f, 446–447 self-regulation and, 329 systems perspectives of the brain and, 48

This index entry from Siegel's text maps the conceptual network in which chaos and complexity are embedded, showing their systematic co-articulation with integration, self-regulation, and systems perspectives throughout the volume.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020aside

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a dynamic system is one that changes over time … a mathematical construction that aims to describe and predict the way an actual system changes over time

Thompson provides a foundational methodological clarification of the dynamic-systems concept — the mathematical modeling framework underlying complexity theory — as background for his broader enactivist account of mind in life.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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They are working with mechanical systems … that are not limited by the categories traditionally used to understand them. They seem to have minds of their own … The patterns that emerge from graphs of chaotic dynamics defy description.

Ulanov characterizes complex dynamical systems as entities that exceed classical categorical understanding, whose fractal patterning resists description in ways that resonate with depth-psychological encounters with the unconscious.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971aside

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