Self-organisation
How systems create order without anyone directing it.
Self-organisation denotes the phenomenon that a system, out of itself, without an external coordinator, appears to develop organised patterns. No ant instructs the other ants how a small bridge should be built. No neuron prescribes to the others which thought they should jointly form. And yet it seems to happen.
The most tangible demonstration is five metronomes on a board resting on two cans — as may be seen on the home page of this platform. Set them ticking at random moments, and at first they are in chaos. But the board rolls very gently back and forth beneath their weight, and that motion couples them to one another. Within a minute they are all ticking precisely in synchrony. No one has directed them; the coupling between the individual tickers has caused an order to arise that was not there before. Christiaan Huygens described this phenomenon already in 1665 in two pendulum clocks — he called it sympathy of clocks.
The same principle is found in a laser: in an ordinary lamp, atoms emit light waves in disorderly fashion, each at its own rhythm. Pump in more energy, and they suddenly synchronise — and from that collective coherence emerges the laser beam. No one directs this. It happens through local interactions between the atoms, which above a threshold allow a global order to arise.
Haken and synergetics
The German physicist Hermann Haken developed from his work on lasers a whole discipline called synergetics: the study of self-organisation in complex systems. Central to it stands the notion of the order parameter: a global variable that describes the system's behaviour at the macro level and — through what he calls enslavement — comes to govern the behaviour of the individual components.
For psychology and psychotherapy, Günter Schiepek has systematically elaborated this tradition. A therapeutic process, he argues, is a self-organising system. The order parameter is not a single variable but a pattern — an interplay of complaints, meanings, relationships and behaviour that has a direction as a whole. And like a laser, such a system may suddenly reorganise: a new order parameter arises, and with it a new mode 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 from self-organisation has a radical implication for what we do as therapists. We are not the director who steers the system somewhere. We are part — an important and possibly well-meaning part — of a system that organises itself. 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 the instructive model of therapy. More modest: we need not be able to explain or prescribe everything. More ambitious: our work demands attention to what makes for conditions — safety, meaning-making, time, rhythm, repeated attention to what arises. Schiepek calls these the "generic principles" of psychotherapy as a self-organising process: creating stability, mobilising reserves of energy, identifying meaningful patterns, and awaiting the moment at which reorganisation announces itself.
Self-organisation need not be "alternative"
Perhaps this is the most important thing: thinking from self-organisation is not anti-protocol or anti-evidence-based. It is a different level of thinking lying beneath protocols. Protocols often work precisely because they create conditions in which self-organisation can take place — not because they directly "produce" the system. One who sees this uses protocols with more flexibility and with better timing.
Accepting self-organisation also means giving something up: the idea that we are fully in control. For some clinicians this is a relief; for others, a loss. For patients it almost always seems a relief — they are not broken because a protocol does not work with them; the system that they are calls for other conditions to be able to reorganise itself.
Treatment as co-regulation
One who takes self-organisation seriously will look at the treatment relationship differently. Therapist and client are a coupled system — just like the metronomes on the board. The relationship itself works like the board: lightly moving along, coupling, and thereby letting a common rhythm arise. Sometimes the relationship is the stabilising factor; sometimes precisely the destabilising one. When to intervene, when not, is in this language not a matter of technique choice but of sensitivity to the phase of the system.
Thinking in self-organisation also offers patients a different story about themselves. Getting stuck appears, through this lens, more readily understandable — not as personal failure, but as the working of persistent patterns that keep themselves in place, in a system that came about through coupling and that, through coupling, can also change.