Editorial: Dynamic systems theory and embodiment in psychotherapy research. A new look at process and outcome

(2015) Editorial: Dynamic systems theory and embodiment in psychotherapy research. A new look at process and outcome. Front. Psychol. 6:914. This research topic encompasses a collection of articles from a dynamic systems and embodiment perspective on psychotherapy research. The collection follows the general tenet that communicative processes in psychotherapy are a field-dynamic phenomenon with temporal extension occurring in a context. The context of psychotherapy, at any point in time, is given by multiple elements that belong to different phenomenological domains (e.g., sensation, behavior, affectivity, thought, language) and interact with each other and the environment over time (Salvatore and Tschacher, 2012). What works is the interaction between elements—namely, their being part of a whole—rather than the elements themselves. Consequently, no element is considered to possess invariant clinical meaning; rather, its impact on the entire therapeutic system is mediated by the field, understood as the set of ever-changing, co-occurring elements regulating (e.g., " enslaving ") the system's behavior. In addition, psychotherapy unfolds irreversibly through time. Everything happening within the communication between client and therapist (and within their minds) occurs in a time-frame, i.e., owed to what happened before, and paving the way for what will follow. In this sense, psychotherapy—just as any form of interaction—is inherently dynamic, and as such time-dependent. Although these observations are familiar to clinicians, they have been widely neglected by researchers who have continued to endorse reductionist approaches (e.g., Elliott and Anderson, 1994). This is partly so because alternative approaches entail epistemological and methodological difficulties. Viewing psychotherapy in terms of field dynamics raises the epistemological issue of downward causality, i.e., the problem of modeling the pars-toto relation among levels of explanation. Moreover, the time dependency of psychotherapy processes renders most traditional strategies of data analysis unsuitable because these strategies commonly assume independent observations. can offer a solution to this impasse. DST has developed in various fields (e.g., physics, biology, as well as cognitive sciences), adopting a holistic and time-dependent approach. However, it is not widely applied in psychotherapy research. The reason may be sought in the fact that DST represents a challenge for the traditional, evidence-based approach to the empirical study of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy research adopts mainly an inductive, data-driven logic of investigation. Accordingly, research is assumed to deal with facts, with interpretation following after. DST challenges such a view. It proposes a new way of looking at the relation between theory and data: Data are not self-contained …