Self-organisation
How systems create order without anyone directing it.
Self-organisation refers to the phenomenon that a system appears to develop organised patterns of its own accord, without an external coordinator. No ant tells the other ants how a small bridge should be built, and no neuron prescribes to the others which thought they ought to form together. Yet order seems to arise.
A tangible example is five metronomes on a board resting on two cans, as can be seen on the home page of this platform. When they are started at random moments, they first tick out of step. The board, however, rolls slightly back and forth under their weight, and that movement couples the metronomes to one another. Within a minute they are all ticking in time. No one has conducted them; the coupling between the individual tickers allows an order to emerge that was not there before. Christiaan Huygens described this phenomenon as early as 1665 in two pendulum clocks; he called it sympathy of clocks.
The same principle can be recognised in a laser. In an ordinary lamp, atoms emit light waves in a disorderly way, each at its own rhythm. When more energy is supplied, they fall into step rather suddenly, and from that shared coherence the laser beam arises. Here too there is no conductor. The order comes from local interactions between the atoms, which above a threshold allow a global order to emerge.
Haken and synergetics
Starting from his work on lasers, the German physicist Hermann Haken developed a field of his own, synergetics: the study of self-organisation in complex systems. A central concept in it is the order parameter, a global variable that describes the behaviour of the system at the macro level and which, through what Haken calls enslavement, comes to determine the behaviour of the individual components.
Günter Schiepek has systematically elaborated this tradition for psychology and psychotherapy. In his view a therapeutic process is a self-organising system. The order parameter in it is not a single variable but a pattern: an interplay of complaints, meanings, relationships and behaviour that as a whole has a direction. And like a laser, such a system can reorganise rather suddenly, giving rise to a new order parameter and with it a new way of functioning.
"Our intelligence is based on the collective behaviour of billions of neurons; a single neuron is not intelligent." (Van der Maas, 2024)
What it means in practice
Thinking in terms of self-organisation has consequences for how we understand our role as therapists. We are then not the director who steers the system in a particular direction, but part of a system that organises itself: an important and usually well-meaning part. What we influence is not the outcome directly, but the conditions under which the system can reorganise.
This is at once more modest and more ambitious than an instructive model of therapy. More modest, because we need not be able to explain or prescribe everything. More ambitious, because our work calls for attention to what shapes those conditions: safety, meaning-making, time, rhythm and repeated attention to whatever emerges. In this context Schiepek speaks of "generic principles" of psychotherapy as a self-organising process: creating stability, mobilising reserves of energy, identifying meaningful patterns and waiting for the moment at which reorganisation presents itself.
Self-organisation need not be "alternative"
An important point, in our view, is that thinking in terms of self-organisation does not stand in opposition to protocols or evidence-based work. It is a different level of thinking that lies, as it were, beneath protocols. Protocols may work precisely because they create conditions in which self-organisation can take place, and not because they "produce" the change directly. Keeping this in mind makes it possible to use protocols more flexibly and with a better sense of timing.
Taking self-organisation seriously also means letting go of something: the idea that we are fully in control. For some clinicians this is a relief, for others a loss. For patients it often seems to be a relief. That a protocol does not take hold with them does not mean that they are broken; the system that they are may need different conditions in order to reorganise.
Treatment as co-regulation
Taking self-organisation seriously also changes how one looks at the treatment relationship. Therapist and client form a coupled system, just like the metronomes on the board. The relationship works like the board itself: moving slightly along, connecting, and thereby able to let a common rhythm emerge. Sometimes the relationship has a stabilising effect, sometimes a destabilising one. In this language, the question of when to intervene and when not to is less a matter of choosing a technique than of sensitivity to the phase the system is in.
Thinking in terms of self-organisation can also offer patients a different story about themselves. From this perspective, getting stuck can be understood as the working of persistent patterns rather than as personal failure: patterns that maintain themselves, in a system that came about through coupling and can change again through coupling.