Synergetics
The science of self-organisation — how a new order emerges from the interplay of many parts.
Synergetics is, in the words of its founder, the most elaborated transdisciplinary theory of self-organisation to date. It studies how, out of the interaction of countless small parts at a micro level, an ordered pattern suddenly arises at a macro level — and how such a pattern then passes over 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 discipline was founded in the 1970s by the German physicist Hermann Haken, initially out of his work on the laser. In an ordinary light source the atoms emit their waves in an uncoordinated way, each in its own rhythm. Once enough energy is supplied, they suddenly synchronise, and from that collective coherence the focused laser beam arises. No one directs this; it happens through the mutual coupling of the atoms once a threshold is passed. Haken saw in this single phenomenon a general principle, which he then found again in physics, chemistry, biology and ultimately in psychology.
Order parameters and circular causality
Central to synergetics is the notion of the order parameter: a quantity that describes the behaviour of the whole, and that — through what Haken called enslaving — in turn comes to govern the behaviour of the individual parts. 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 marshals the parts. It is this reciprocity that explains how a system can steer itself without any steersman.
A complex system, seen this way, cannot simply assume any state at all. It is led by its order parameters toward a limited number of coherent patterns. And when circumstances change, the system can jump from one pattern to another — an order transition, preceded by a phase of critical instability in which the old order loses its grip and the new is not yet fixed.
Synergetics in psychotherapy
For psychology and psychotherapy this tradition has been systematically worked out by Günter Schiepek. A therapeutic process, the thought runs, can be understood as a self-organising system. The order parameter is then no single variable but a pattern — an interplay of complaints, meanings, relationships and behaviour that, as a whole, has a direction. And just as with the laser, such a system can suddenly reorder itself: a new order parameter arises, and with it a new mode of functioning.
What this means for the clinician's action we work out further elsewhere in this lexicon — under self-organisation and the generic principles Schiepek derives from it. Here the core suffices: synergetics shifts attention from directly steering the outcome to creating the conditions under which a system can order itself anew.
Put cautiously, one might say that synergetics supplies the concepts by which many of the other terms in this lexicon — emergence, order parameter, control parameter, critical instability, phase transition — fall into one coherent frame. It is, in a sense, the grammar behind the vocabulary.