A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology

Book excerpt: Fractal dynamics provide an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout physical, biological, and psychological realms. This book’s conceptual framework helps to reconcile several persistent dichotomies in the natural sciences, including mind-brain, linear-nonlinear, subjective-objective, and even personal-transpersonal processes. A fractal approach is especially useful when applied to recursive processes of consciousness, both within their ordinary and anomalous manifestations. This novel way to study the interconnection of seemingly divided wholes encompasses multiple dimensions of experience and being. It brings together experts in diverse fields—neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, and professors of religion and music composition—to demonstrate the value of fractals as model, method, and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing these areas back into a natural-scientific framework.