Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) enters the depth-psychology corpus not as a peripheral import from physics but as a conceptual architecture that multiple authors deploy to reframe the relationship between organism, mind, and environment. Evan Thompson provides the most systematic treatment, situating DST within enactive cognitive science and phenomenology: the brain, the organism, and the agent-environment dyad are each construed as dynamic systems whose states evolve through time, exhibiting bifurcations, self-organization, and emergent order parameters that are irreducible to their components. Thompson’s engagement with Haken and Kelso’s coordination dynamics demonstrates how DST can move from motor behavior to broader questions of meaning and cognition. Daniel Siegel imports DST into developmental neuroscience, treating the brain as a complex nonlinear dynamic system whose self-organizing emergent property — the mind — arises from both embodied neural processes and relational interactions. Allan Schore draws on the language of chaos and dynamic systems to theorize affective regulation and the ontogeny of the self, foregrounding sensitivity to perturbation and flexible state-switching as marks of psychological health. Ann Ulanov and Jan Wiener’s invocations of DST are more oblique but telling: the former traces analogies between chaotic attractors and Jungian symbolic dynamics, while Wiener reports Cambray’s application of self-organizing systems to the transference. The animating tension across these positions concerns whether DST is primarily a mathematical formalism, a metaphor, or a genuine ontological framework for depth-psychological processes.
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 offers the foundational distinction between a dynamic system as an actual entity and as a mathematical model, grounding all subsequent applications of DST in cognitive and biological science.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
viewing the singular brain inside of a skull within a body. The brain is a complex system whose processes organize its functioning… a complex system has an ‘emergent property’ that arises from the interaction of its basic constituents. This property is called ‘self-organization.’
Siegel explicitly frames the brain as a nonlinear dynamic system whose defining feature is self-organization, extending this logic to mind and to dyadic interpersonal systems.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
Haken, Kelso, and colleagues devised a dynamic-systems model to describe and predict these properties of motor behavior. The model describes how the relative phase relation bet
Thompson demonstrates DST’s empirical purchase through Kelso and Haken’s coordination dynamics research, where rhythmic finger movements exemplify bifurcation, bistability, and hysteresis in biological systems.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
‘Such spontaneous pattern formation is exactly what we mean by self-organization: the system organizes itself, but there is no ‘self,’ no agent inside the system doing the organizing’
Thompson, citing Kelso, articulates the central DST principle that collective self-organization produces emergent macrolevel structure without any homuncular agent, challenging representationalist accounts of mind.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Morphodynamics is a branch of dynamic systems theory concerned with the emergence of form or structure… behavior is morphodynamic.
Thompson connects Merleau-Ponty’s account of behavior as structured dialogue to morphodynamics, a DST subdiscipline, thereby grounding phenomenological concepts in the mathematics of self-organizing form.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
dynamicism and embodiment are logically independent theoretical commitments… dynamicism and embodiment go well together and are intimately related for many theorists.
Thompson establishes that while DST and embodied cognition are logically separable, their synthesis — embodied dynamicism — constitutes the most powerful theoretical framework for enactive cognitive science.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
certain aspects of social interactions can be addressed in the language of self-organizing, dynamical processes… what matters for the organization of rhythmic interpersonal coordination is a coupling between two oscillatory components
Siegel extends DST beyond individual neural systems to interpersonal coordination, arguing that dyadic social interactions obey the same self-organizing dynamical laws as within-brain processes.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
Order parameters are semantic, relational quantities that are intrinsically meaningful to system functioning… dynamics is cast in terms that are semantically meaningful.
Thompson argues that coordination dynamics transcends purely syntactic physical description because its order parameters carry intrinsic semantic meaning, bridging DST and the enactive account of autonomous meaning-constitution.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Chapter 4 investigates a strand of holistic thinking known as dynamic systems theory and highlights self-organizing systems that he characterizes as emergent. Emergent phenomena, he asserts, are likely to make themselves felt at the edge of order and chaos.
Wiener reports Cambray’s application of DST to the analytic transference, proposing that emergence at the edge of order and chaos marks transformative moments when the self reorganizes within the therapeutic dyad.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to small perturbations, and that these tiny feedback perturbations control trajectories in chaotic systems… small perturbations can be used both to stabilize regular dynamic behaviors and to direct chaotic trajectories rapidly to a ‘desired state.’
Schore invokes chaos-theoretic principles from DST to argue that the psychobiological self requires sensitivity to perturbation for adaptive state-switching, linking regulatory neuroscience to dynamic systems concepts.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
fractal attractors are dynamic in the fullest sense of the word. 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
Ulanov maps chaotic attractor dynamics onto Jungian symbol formation, suggesting that the bifurcation between stability and instability characteristic of DST is structurally homologous to the tension between conscious and unconscious psychic processes.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
the patterns that are beginning to emerge from studies of chaotic dynamics bear an intriguing resemblance to those Jung described… the hard sciences are beginning to speak a language remarkably similar to Jung’s.
Ulanov argues that complex dynamic systems research independently arrives at formal properties — irreducibility, self-similarity, tension between simplicity and complexity — that parallel Jung’s phenomenology of symbolic and archetypal processes.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting
Rather than asking ‘What is this made of?’, systems thinkers ask, ‘How do the components of this function as a pattern?’ and ‘What is the larger context in which it operates, and how is it affected by that context?’
Schwartz traces systems thinking from organismic biology as the epistemological precursor to dynamic systems approaches, framing IFS therapy within a holistic rather than reductionist understanding of psychological organization.
, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995supporting
Developmental systems theory: applied to enculturation, 403–411; in enactive cognitive science, 458n11; in enactive evolution, 206; overview of, 187–194; reconsiders adaptationism, 202–205
Thompson’s index entry situates Developmental Systems Theory as a distinct but cognate framework to DST within the enactive program, applied to evolution, enculturation, and the critique of gene-centric adaptationism.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development
Thompson’s bibliography references Lewis and Granic’s edited volume on dynamic systems approaches to emotional development, indicating the established integration of DST into developmental affective science.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
dynamic systems theory 150
Gallagher’s index entry confirms dynamic systems theory as a named theoretical resource in his account of embodied cognition, though the reference is indexical rather than expository.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside
Research into EKG and EEG patterns, however, suggests that chaotic patterns pr
Ulanov invokes empirical research on cardiac and neural chaos to challenge homeostatic models of bodily health, implying that dynamic complexity rather than simple periodicity is the signature of vitality.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971aside
Genes: under autopoietic criteria, 123; in developmental systems theory, 191, 404; in genocentrism, 179–180; homeotic, 198–200
Thompson’s index situates developmental systems theory in explicit contrast to genocentrism, indicating that DST serves as a key counter-framework to gene-centric reductionism within enactive biology.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside