Sympathy of clocks
The therapeutic relationship as a coupled system — read through the lens of an experiment from 1665.
From a sickbed in his house in The Hague, Christiaan Huygens wrote in February 1665 a letter to his father. He had noticed something that would not let him go.
From a common beam he had hung two pendulum clocks, both of his own making. After several hours, the pendulums swung in exactly opposite rhythm. If he set them deliberately out of step, they returned, within half an hour, of their own accord to that same anti-phase. Sympathy of clocks he called it — a sympathy that did not arise from good-willed intentions, but from the beam to which both clocks knew themselves to be bound.
Only three centuries later, with the rise of Hermann Haken's synergetics, did science begin to understand this phenomenon systematically. When two oscillating systems are connected by a weak coupling, they prove, under certain conditions, to fall of their own accord into a common rhythm. Neither needs to wish it; no instruction need be given. It suffices that there is a beam.
A second pendulum beside the first
For one who works in the consulting room, this observation carries something worth studying. The therapeutic relationship, from this perspective, lends itself to being read not solely as technique or method, but also as coupling. Two dynamical systems — a patient and a clinician — come into each other's vicinity and prove, under the right conditions, to become parts of one another's rhythm. A breath that slows during a session. A shoulder that gradually drops. A thought that softens, not because it has been restructured, but because it comes to rest in another register.
In the work of Schiepek, this phenomenon — under the term order parameter — is further elaborated. A therapeutic process, he argues, itself forms a dynamical system; it has its own patterns, its own hesitations, its own tipping points. What the clinician brings is, in a sense, a second pendulum beside the first. What then develops depends on the beam: on the quality of the connection, on the attention and the presence it can bear.
"Rhythm between people rarely arises by will. It arises through what connects them." — freely after Strogatz
The beam is built
This image is no plea for passivity. A good beam is no coincidence — it is built, and maintained. Time, regularity, sincere interest, fitting reserve, repeated commitment: these are the materials of which such a beam is made. But it is a reminder that what is effective in psychotherapy does not arise only from what happens in the separate pendulums, but as much from what can arise between them.
A postscript from the laboratory
Huygens's experiment has, by the way, a nuance that is seldom told. When he placed the two clocks too far apart, or made the beam too heavy, the synchronisation disappeared. The coupling demanded a precise distance — not too close, where the pendulums would jam each other; not too far, where no sympathy was possible.
That detail too lends itself, with some reserve, to translation into the consulting room. A distance too small smothers; one too great isolates. Between these poles lies the range within which a connection can develop. What that range is in a concrete conversation is better felt in silence than described in rules.