Nature heals: An informational entropy account of self-organization and change in field psychotherapy.
Physics of life reviews December 1, 2024 Pietro Sarasso, Wolfgang Tschacher, Felix Schoeller et al. 11 citations
Psychotherapeutic change can be modeled using biophysical principles from synergetics and the free energy principle. Introducing sensory surprise into the patient-therapist system may trigger self-organization and the formation of new attractor states, disrupting entrenched patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The therapist can facilitate this by cultivating epistemic trust and modulating embodied attention, allowing surprising affective states into shared awareness. Transient increases in free energy enable updates to generative models, expanding the phenomenal field. Increased entropy, complexity, and lower determinism at behavioral and physiological levels are proposed as markers and predictors of therapeutic gains. Future research should explore how the therapist's openness to novelty shapes outcomes.