Synergetics
The science of self-organisation: how a new order arises from the interplay of many parts.
Synergetics is, according to its founder, the most fully developed interdisciplinary theory of self-organisation to date. It studies how an ordered pattern at the macro level can arise from the interaction between many small parts at the micro level, sometimes rather suddenly, and how such a pattern can subsequently change into another. The word comes from the Greek synergein, to work together: the order is not imposed from outside but is the result of what the parts do together.
The field was founded in the 1970s by the German physicist Hermann Haken, initially on the basis of his work on the laser. In an ordinary light source, the atoms emit their light waves in an uncoordinated way, each in its own rhythm. When enough energy is supplied, they fall into step rather abruptly, and from that collective coherence the focused laser beam arises. No one conducts this; it happens through the mutual coupling of the atoms once a threshold is crossed. Haken saw a general principle in this phenomenon, which he subsequently found again in physics, chemistry, biology and eventually psychology as well.
Order parameters and circular causality
Central to synergetics is the concept of the order parameter: a quantity that describes the behaviour of the whole and that in turn comes to govern the behaviour of the individual parts, which Haken called enslaving. Between the micro level and the macro level there is thus a circular causality: the parts bring forth the order, and the order then constrains and organises the parts. This reciprocity makes it understandable how a system can steer itself without any helmsman being involved.
Seen in this way, a complex system cannot simply adopt any state. Its order parameters guide it towards a limited number of coherent patterns. When circumstances change, the system can move from one pattern to another: an order transition, preceded by a phase of critical instability in which the old order loses its hold and the new one is not yet settled.
Synergetics in psychotherapy
For psychology and psychotherapy, this tradition has been systematically developed by Günter Schiepek. The idea is that a therapeutic process can be understood as a self-organising system. The order parameter is then not a separate variable but a pattern: an interplay of complaints, meanings, relationships and behaviour that, as a whole, has a direction. As with the laser, such a system can reorganise itself rather suddenly, giving rise to a new order parameter and, with it, a new way of functioning.
What this means for the actions of the clinician is developed further elsewhere in this lexicon, under self-organisation and the generic principles that Schiepek derives from it. Here the core suffices: synergetics shifts attention from steering the outcome directly to creating conditions under which a system can reorganise itself.
Put cautiously, synergetics supplies the concepts through which many other terms in this lexicon, such as emergence, order parameter, control parameter, critical instability and phase transition, come together in one coherent framework. One might call it the grammar behind the vocabulary.