The Psychological Meaning of Chaos

Book excerpt: Annotation The Psychological Meaning of Chaos: Translating Theory Into Practice introduces practicing psychologists to the concepts, implications, and applications of the chaos theories that have revolutionized scientists' concept of the physical world over the past 30 years. This new way of seeing - variously called chaos, nonlinear dynamical systems theory, deterministic chaos, and the broader sciences of complexity - stands in sharp contrast to the linear, reductionistic models that have dominated most psychological thinking. In this new model, unpredictability and instability are accepted as intrinsic to complex systems and essential in any transformative process. Chaos is seen as a healthy and essential part of the creation process, without which new order is impossible. The implications of this new model of systems dynamics for understanding the human change process are enormous. In this book, group and family therapists, developmentalists, and researchers describe the impact that chaos and complexitytheories have on their understanding of human change and their work to promote it. Chaos theory represents the greatest challenge to scientific thinking in this century. It has great potential for psychology, because it offers a model for complex behavior that resonates more closely with psychologists' understanding of the vicissitudes of human change.