I have always believed that complex psychological/psychobiological disorders could not be comprehensively understood through radical reductionistic research. The latter characterizes our current models of mental illness. The expression of the illness, i.e., of the symptoms, is viewed as arising from dysfunctional neurobiological and neurogenetic systems. It is rare to encounter a viewpoint which suggests that the illness itself could be driving the neurogenetic and neurobiological correlates seen in neuroscience research. The neurological signatures may be pluralistic because there are individually patterned (and developmentally formed) autonomic and central responses to threat and annihilation. The complexity of nonlinear multisystems needs to be increasingly taken into account in basic research (otherwise one might be fixated on shadows without exploring what is upstream, in time and space, casting these shadows). I believe that a good portion of what we call the schizophrenic disorders could be best characterized as emergent phenomena which could only be understood when the principles of organization and disorganization across temporal and spatial realms are further delineated. It was very encouraging to discover that within such 'hard' sciences as contemporary physics, attempts are being made to move the field towards emergence and away from reductionism.

Laughlin (2005), professor of physics at Stanford University and Nobel Laureate for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect and author of A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, pointed out that:

“There are two conflicting primal impulses of the human mind-one to simplify a thing to its essentials, the other to see through the essentials to the greater implications” (p. ix).

Laughlin notes that “the natural world is regulated by the essentials and by the powerful principles of organization that flow out of them” (p. ix). This organization can acquire meaning and a life of its own, and begin to transcend the parts from which it is made. At higher levels of complexity, such as is found in human beings and their relational and cultural contexts, cause-and-effect relationships are more difficult to document.

The reductionistic ideal, that nature will be revealed and understood through division into smaller and smaller component parts, needs to be supplemented by the study and understanding of how nature organizes itself, i.e., reductionism giving way to emergence.

Laughlin (2005) concluded:

“We live not at the end of discovery but at the end of Reductionism, a time in which the false ideology of human mastery of all things through microscopics is being swept away by events and reason. This is not to say that microscopic law is wrong or has no purpose , but only that it is rendered irrelevant in many circumstances by its children and its childrens’ children, the higher organizational laws of the world” (p. 221).

Brian Koehler PhD
New York University
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New York NY 10003
212.533.5687
brian_koehler@psychoanalysis.net