Complexity and nonlinear dynamics in psychotherapy

Abstract

Human life changes with time. It seems therefore obvious that most of the phenomena that psychology and psychotherapy are concerned with are dynamic in nature. For human development processes, human change and learning processes, the dynamics and prognosis of mental disorders, problems manifesting in social systems such as couples, families, teams, or the question of how psychotherapy works, self-organization is ubiquitous. In the context of self-organization, complexity is a quality of changing patterns and patterns of change, produced by nonlinear coupled systems. © 2009 Academia Europaea.