Self-organization occupies a generative crossroads in the depth-psychology corpus, where it functions simultaneously as a biophysical principle, a developmental-psychological concept, and an epistemological challenge to homuncular or agent-centric models of the mind. Evan Thompson’s treatment, drawing on Kelso, Maturana, Varela, and Kant, is the most sustained theoretical elaboration: self-organization is defined as spontaneous pattern formation in which the system constitutes its own order through local-to-global and global-to-local dynamics, with no internal executive agent directing the process. This formulation dissolves the distinction between the organizing agent and the organized product—a dissolution Kant had already announced, and which Thompson reads forward through autopoiesis and coordination dynamics. Daniel Siegel imports the concept into developmental neuroscience, arguing that the brain’s self-organizational properties generate states of mind, emotional textures, and attachment configurations. For Siegel, disrupted self-organization manifests clinically as the disorganized attachment that forecloses both internal and external regulation. Philip Flores and Winnicott’s legacy introduce multiple self-organizations as personality subsystems—true and false selves—whose dynamic interplay constitutes character. Across these registers, self-organization names the capacity of a complex system to achieve coherence from within, without external prescription, and its failure or deformation becomes the signature of developmental and psychopathological distress.
“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, via Kelso, defines self-organization as leaderless spontaneous pattern formation in which order emerges from collective dynamics without any internal directing agent.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
natural selection, rather than competing with chance and self-organization, is part of a complex process that involves all three elements, and is itself a phenomenon that has evolved out of the play of the others.
Thompson argues that self-organization is not a rival to Darwinian selection but a constitutive partner in the evolutionary process, challenging the received hierarchy of biological causation.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the self-organizational properties of the system create a sense of ordered complexity out of the trillions of synaptic connections that can be potentially fired.
Siegel identifies self-organization as the mechanism by which the brain constructs stable, emotionally textured states of mind from an otherwise intractable degree of neural complexity.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
Rather, nature organizes itself… We might be closer if we call this inscrutable property of nature an analogue of life.
Thompson reads Kant’s claim that nature organizes itself as the philosophical antecedent of modern self-organization theory, resisting both vitalist and mechanist reductions.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Winnicott envisioned the infant as born with the potential for unique individuality of personality (termed a True Self personality organization) which can develop in the context of a responsive holding environment provided by a good enough mother.
Flores, drawing on Winnicott, frames psychological self-organization as the developmental actualization of an innate true-self organization dependent on adequate environmental holding.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
the physical imperatives of self-organization and dissipation require that the particular sort of selection process leading to the emergence of living systems was at first the selection of the stable (physical selection) and of the efficient (chemical selection) rather than of the reproductively fit.
Thompson argues that self-organization precedes biological selection in evolutionary history, providing the physical substrate upon which Darwinian fitness criteria subsequently operate.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
These children come to experience an anxiety-provoking cycle that leaves them in distress and yet clinging to others in attempts to achieve self-organization.
Siegel demonstrates that disrupted early attachment impairs internal self-organization, compelling the child toward interpersonal regulation as a compensatory external substitute.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
on self-organization, 210–211… on self-organization, 60
Thompson’s index documents Kant and Kelso as the two primary theoretical anchors for his treatment of self-organization, signaling its dual philosophical and empirical lineage.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Organizational closure refers to the self-referential (circular and recursive) network of relations that defines the system as a unity, and operational closure to the reentrant and recurrent dynamics of such a system.
Thompson elaborates Varela’s concept of organizational closure as the formal ground of autonomous self-organization, distinguishing operational self-reference from thermodynamic openness.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
every molecular reaction in the system is generated by the very same system that those molecular reactions produce.
Thompson’s account of autopoiesis presents biological self-production as the paradigm case of self-organization at the molecular level.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
matter, life, and mind ‘participate unequally in the nature of form,’ that they ‘represent different degrees of integration and… constitute a hierarchy in which individuality is progressively achieved’
Thompson reads Merleau-Ponty’s concept of form as a scalar account of self-organization across matter, life, and mind, with individuation increasing as integration deepens.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Emotional self-organization at three time scales. In M. D. Lewis and I. Granic, eds., Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development
Thompson’s bibliography points to M. D. Lewis’s work on emotional self-organization across multiple temporal scales as a key empirical complement to his theoretical framework.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
How, then, does the mind achieve coherence across self-states? How can a four-dimensional sense of coherence—coherence across time—be created with such discontinuous transitions across states?
Siegel frames the problem of coherence across discontinuous self-states as the central challenge that self-organization must solve to sustain a continuous sense of personal identity.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
In such a product nothing is gratuitous, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism.
Thompson invokes Kant’s teleological maxim as the conceptual precondition for understanding organisms as self-organized, purposive unities rather than mechanical assemblages.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
I part company with Jung when he talks about Self with a capital S, the purported central organizing principle of soul.
Bosnak’s rejection of Jung’s capitalized Self as a central organizing principle implicitly challenges a particular model of psychic self-organization in favor of a more distributed, polycentric account.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007aside