ABSTRACT

According to Daniel Stern and his contemporaries at the Boston Change Process Study Group, the key to understanding how change takes place for a client lies in gaining an appreciation of how dynamic systems change in general. Evolution and growth are the inevitable products of open systems slipping into temporary chaos and then reorganising themselves to emerge at a higher level of complexity and functioning. In psychology and psychotherapy there seem to be both direct and oblique references to the emergence of a higher level order. A breakthrough moment is often experienced as a crisis of intense feeling, but, as therapists have seen, it can equally provide an opportunity for new insight and, eventually, the arrival of a higher order. Edward Lorenz concluded that within some dynamic systems there are sensitivities to tiny differences in the input of variables that have the power to dramatically alter the course of the later development of the whole system.