Healing and the therapeutic process

This chapter explores the question: What does complexity have to say about healing and therapeutic process? While historical texts on healing can be found across all cultures, the emergence of therapy as a specific technique for healing has a distinct history. In terms of the complexity sciences, our story begins in the 1950s with family systems theory and with the application of dynamical systems theory to therapy. Despite differences, scholars are interested in a set of core issues, all of which we explore in this chapter. They include the role of time in healing; how therapy takes place within complex social systems; the dynamics, nonlinearities, initial conditions and feedback loops in the therapeutic process; embodiment and synchrony in therapy; therapeutic process as both stochastic and deterministic; self-organization and attractors; the stability of mental disorders; how therapy is both time varying and time-invariant; symptom targeting; and therapeutic synergetics.