Main description:

Self-organization and clinical psychology signals the advent
of a new paradigm in psychology. Physicists, neuroscientists
and individual and grouptherapists have joined forces to
elucidate the new and exciting advances that are being
achieved by applying the concepts of non-linear dynamics and
self-organization to the human nervous system and the mind.

Contents:

I Synergetics in Psychology: Basic Issues.- Application of Synergetics to Clinical Psychology.- Synergetics in Psychology.- Chaos in Health and Disease - Phenomenology and Theory.- Chaos and Disorder.- Instability and Cognitive Order Formation: Self-Organization Principles, Psychological Experiments, and Psychotherapeutic Interventions.- II Simulation and Empirically Based Models of Self-Organizing Processes.- Simulation of Psychological Processes: Basic Issues and an Illustration Within the Etiology of a Depressive Disorder.- Simulating Clinical Processes by Population Dynamics.- Synergetics in Psychiatry - Simulation of Evolutionary Patterns of Schizophrenia on the Basis of Nonlinear Difference Equations.- Dynamical Systems and the Development of Schizophrenic Symptoms - An Approach to a Formalization.- Psychiatric Disorders: Are They "Dynamical Diseases"?.- Using Multivariate Time Series Models in Systemic Analysis.- Interactional Bifurcations in Human Interaction - A Formal Approach.- III Self-Organizing Processes in Psychotherapy.- Synergetics of Psychotherapy.- Theories of Self-Organizing Processes and the Contribution of Immediate Interaction to Change in Psychotherapy.- System-Theoretical Prerequisites Concerning Paradoxical Intervention.- GOLEM - Two Adaptive Systems Communicate.- The Relation Between Mental and Social Systems.- Clinical Constellations: A Concept for Therapeutic Practice.- IV Studies of Social and Mental Self-Organization.- Self-Organization in Social Groups.- Applicability of Dimension Analysis to Data in Psychology.- The System Game as a Research Paradigm for Self-Organization Processes in Complex Social Systems.- The Systemic Character of the Psychosocial and Psychiatric Health Services.- Recursive Interaction and the Dynamics of Knowledge Production in Research Groups: An Empirical Simulation of Knowledge Production.- Author Index.