Chaos-Theoretical Approach to Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychotherapy. Part 1: The Six Fundamental Characteristics of Chaos and a Process-Oriented Psychiatry (POPSY)

Abstract: This work (part 1 'The Six Fundamental Characteristics of Chaos and a Process-Oriented Psychiatry (POPSY)' and part 2 'A New Hypothesis as to the Nature of Psychosis') concerns the semantics of chaos theory. Part 1 introduces a new approach to psychiatry and part 2 a new hypothesis about how the mental state of psychosis may arise in the brain as a 'linear' information processing pathology. Six general and six specific fundamental characteristics, directly inferred from empirical observations on chaotic systems, lead in part 1 to a mathematically and physically stringent perspective on psychological phenomena which until now could only be grasped intuitively: Chaotic systems are in a general sense dynamic, intrinsically coherent, deterministic, recursive, reactive and structured; in a specific sense, self-organizing, unpredictable, nonreproducible, triadic, unstable and self-similar. Many concepts of chaos theory can be associated with corresponding concepts in psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, thus enabling a general understanding of the human psyche as a (fractal) chaotic system and an explanation of certain mental developments, such as the course of schizophrenia, the course of psychosis and psychotherapy as chaotic processes. Comparison and contrast of classical and chaotic physical theory leads in part 1 to four postulates and one hypothesis motivating a new, dynamic, nonlinear approach to classical, causal psychiatry: Process-Oriented Psychiatry or 'POPSY', for short. Four aspects of the relationship between chaos theory and POPSY are discussed: (1) Identification of chaos/picture of illness involves a definition of chaos/psychosis and a dicussion of the 6 logical characteristics of each. This leads to the concept of dynamical disease and to the idea of 'psychological disturbance as dynamical illness'. (2) Assessment of chaos/diagnosis of illness requires a look at the 3 different classes of (non-quantum) motion as models of 3 different possible courses of illness and offers modern methods for the quantitative assessment of chaotic (fractal) motion. (3) Prediction of chaos/prognosis of illness considers how each of these 3 classes of motion implies a different way of looking into the future: linear-causal, statistical and nonlinear-fractal, respectively. (4) Control of chaos/treatment of illness has certain implications to complementary medicine. On the one hand, it is argued in part 1 that the developmental course of psychosis is chaotic. On the other hand, we propose in part 2 the hypothesis that the mental state of psychosis may be a linear information processing pathology.

Keyword(s): Chaos

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