Download or read book Complexity of the Self written by V. F. Guidano and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1987-05-09 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this profound work, Vittorio Guidano expands upon his earlier seminal contributions on the application of cognitive and developmental principles to individuals struggling with various forms of psychopathology. Here, he fully develops the idea that individuals' experience, both positive and negative, are powerfully influenced by their personal ``psychological organizations.'Focusing primarily on the eating disorders, the phobias (with agoraphobia as the prototype) obsessive-compulsive patterns, and depression, Guidano illustrates how early developmental experiences and ongoing psychological processes may collude to perpetuate dysfunctional patterns and personal distress. The central and perhaps most exciting thesis in this new expression of Guidano's thinking is that the ``deep structure' or ``core organizing processes`` that constrain human psychological experience may be at the heart of successful intervention as well as the classical problems of resistance, relapse, and refractory behaviors. Guidano's contention is at once simple and powerful: those psychological processes involved in the development and maintenance of personal identity, or ``self' that should be the primary foci of research and intervention in psychological disorders. The meaning of Guidano's perspective for clinical practice is perhaps best expressed in the author's own words: ``Knowing the basic elements of the personal cognitive organization that underlie the pattern of disturbed behavior and emotions, the therapist can behave, from the beginning, in such a way as to build a relationship as effective as possible for that particular client. In other words, the therapist should be able to establish a relationship that respects the client's personal identity and systemic coherence and that, at the same time, does not confirm the basic pathogenic assumptions. For example, in working with agoraphobics, the therapist has to respect their self-images centered on the need to be in control. He/she can do this by avoiding any direct attack on their controlling attitudes and by leaving them a wide margin of control in the relationship. At the same time the therapist should avoid confirming their assumptions about the somatic origin of their emotional disturbances or about their inborn fragility. In short, the therapist who can anticipate the models of self and reality tacitly entertained by the client is surely better able to help the development of a cooperative and secure therapeutic relationship than the therapist who cannot make such anticipations. This timely and provocative volume offers exciting new ideas about how to conceptualize and facilitate change in the ``self system.' With the rare combination of his Renaissance intellect and integrative practical expertise, Guidano has been able to draw together many disparate themes from object relations theory, ego psychology, attachment theory, constructivist models of human cognition, and lifespan developmental psychology. It is must reading for the practicing professional, the helping apprentice, and anyone interested in glimpsing the cutting edge at the growing interface between cognitive and clinical science.
Download or read book Self Concept Clarity written by Jennifer Lodi-Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This welcome resource traces the evolution of self-concept clarity and brings together diverse strands of research on this important and still-developing construct. Locating self-concept clarity within current models of personality, identity, and the self, expert contributors define the construct and its critical roles in both individual and collective identity and functioning. The book examines commonly-used measures for assessing clarity, particularly in relation to the more widely understood concept of self-esteem, with recommendations for best practices in assessment. In addition, a wealth of current data highlights the links between self-concept clarity and major areas of mental wellness and dysfunction, from adaptation and leadership to body image issues and schizophrenia. Along the way, it outlines important future directions in research on self-concept clarity. Included in the coverage: Situating self-concept clarity in the landscape of personality. Development of self-concept clarity across the lifespan. Self-concept clarity and romantic relationships. Who am I and why does it matter? Linking personal identity and self-concept clarity. Consequences of self-concept clarity for well-being and motivation. Self-concept clarity and psychopathology. Self-Concept Clarity fills varied theoretical, empirical, and practical needs across mental health fields, and will enhance the work of academics, psychologists interested in the construct as an area of research, and clinicians working with clients struggling with developing and improving their self-concept clarity.
Download or read book Emergence Complexity and Self organization written by Alicia Juarrero and published by Isce Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics. This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincaré, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of General Systems Theory. In their detailed and comprehensive introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A. Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious, scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
Download or read book At Home in the Universe written by Stuart Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life.
Download or read book Self Organizing Complexity in Psychological Systems written by Craig Piers and published by Jason Aronson, Incorporated. This book was released on 2007-04-18 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-Organizing Complexity in Psychological Systems offers a contemporary perspective on the mind through a compilation of original chapters written by some of the leading researchers in the area of complexity theory. In each of the chapters, the authors attempt to use complexity theory to inform and in some cases reformulate existing theories of brain function (Freeman; Grigsby & Osuch), personality (Grigsby & Osuch), psychic organization and structure (Goldstein; Piers), human development (Demos), psychopathology (Palombo; Piers) and psychotherapeutic change (Palombo).
Download or read book Escaping The Self written by Roy F. Baumeister and published by . This book was released on 1991-10-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the possible costs associated with the overemphasis on selfhood.
Download or read book Dynamical Psychology written by Jay Friedenberg and published by Isce Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past several decades, the sciences have witnessed a significant paradigm shift. Our traditional notions of order, energy, causality and methodology have all been upended. A new set of views has arisen that enables us to better understand and examine the complexity of nature. In this perspective, behavior is nonlinear, order emerges spontaneously and responses are best understood as the movement of trajectories through multi-dimensional space. This book examines the role that dynamical systems, complexity science, networks, and fractals play in helping to explain the most difficult thing of all: ourselves.
Download or read book Organize for Complexity written by Niels Pflaeging and published by Betacodex Press. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited update for work and organizations in the knowledge age
Download or read book Evolution and the Emergent Self written by Raymond L. Neubauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how humans evolved from the cosmos and prebiotic earth and what types of biological, chemical, and physical sciences drove this complex process. The author presents his view of nature which attributes the rising complexity of life to the continual increasing of information content, first in genes and then in brains.
Download or read book An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications written by Ming Li and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Briefly, we review the basic elements of computability theory and prob ability theory that are required. Finally, in order to place the subject in the appropriate historical and conceptual context we trace the main roots of Kolmogorov complexity. This way the stage is set for Chapters 2 and 3, where we introduce the notion of optimal effective descriptions of objects. The length of such a description (or the number of bits of information in it) is its Kolmogorov complexity. We treat all aspects of the elementary mathematical theory of Kolmogorov complexity. This body of knowledge may be called algo rithmic complexity theory. The theory of Martin-Lof tests for random ness of finite objects and infinite sequences is inextricably intertwined with the theory of Kolmogorov complexity and is completely treated. We also investigate the statistical properties of finite strings with high Kolmogorov complexity. Both of these topics are eminently useful in the applications part of the book. We also investigate the recursion theoretic properties of Kolmogorov complexity (relations with Godel's incompleteness result), and the Kolmogorov complexity version of infor mation theory, which we may call "algorithmic information theory" or "absolute information theory. " The treatment of algorithmic probability theory in Chapter 4 presup poses Sections 1. 6, 1. 11. 2, and Chapter 3 (at least Sections 3. 1 through 3. 4).
Download or read book Chaos and Complexity in Psychology written by Stephen J. Guastello and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-10 with total page 1020 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many books have discussed methodological advances in nonlinear dynamical systems theory (NDS), this volume is unique in its focus on NDS's role in the development of psychological theory. After an introductory chapter covering the fundamentals of chaos, complexity and other nonlinear dynamics, subsequent chapters provide in-depth coverage of each of the specific topic areas in psychology. A concluding chapter takes stock of the field as a whole, evaluating important challenges for the immediate future. The chapters are written by experts in the use of NDS in each of their respective areas, including biological, cognitive, developmental, social, organizational and clinical psychology. Each chapter provides an in-depth examination of theoretical foundations and specific applications and a review of relevant methods. This edited collection represents the state of the art in NDS science across the disciplines of psychology.
Download or read book The Complexity of Self Government written by Ruth Lane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complexity of Self Government represents a revolutionary approach to political science. Bottom-up theory turns political and social analysis upside down by focusing analytic attention not on vacuous abstractions but on the individual men and women who either consciously or inadvertently create the institutions within which they live. Understanding this practical level of human activity is made possible through complexity theory, recently developed in computer models, but of wider use in understanding everyday human behaviour. To this complexity framework, the book adds social science to give life and colour to the analytical picture: micro-sociology from Garfinkel and Goffman, anthropology from Bourdieu, and non-technical game theory based on Thomas Schelling's microanalytics, to give rigour and bite. Theoretical examples include India's Mumbai, Iran, the marshes of southern Iraq, Berlusconi's Italy, backcountry China, Zimbabwe, and Nelson Mandela's revolution in South Africa.
Download or read book Chemical Complexity written by Alexander S. Mikhailov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an outline of theoretical concepts and their experimental verification in studies of self-organization phenomena in chemical systems, as they emerged in the mid-20th century and have evolved since. Presenting essays on selected topics, it was prepared by authors who have made profound contributions to the field. Traditionally, physical chemistry has been concerned with interactions between atoms and molecules that produce a variety of equilibrium structures - or the 'dead' order - in a stationary state. But biological cells exhibit a different 'living' kind of order, prompting E. Schrödinger to pose his famous question “What is life?” in 1943. Through an unprecedented theoretical and experimental development, it was later revealed that biological self-organization phenomena are in complete agreement with the laws of physics, once they are applied to a special class of thermodynamically open systems and non-equilibrium states. This knowledge has in turn led to the design and synthesis of simple inorganic systems capable of self-organization effects. These artificial 'living organisms' are able to operate on macroscopic to microscopic scales, even down to single-molecule machines. In the future, such research could provide a basis for a technological breakthrough, comparable in its impact with the invention of lasers and semiconductors. Its results can be used to control natural chemical processes, and to design artificial complex chemical processes with various functionalities. The book offers an extensive discussion of the history of research on complex chemical systems and its future prospects.
Download or read book Self Organization in Biological Systems written by Scott Camazine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinated movements of a school of fish. Researchers are finding in such patterns--phenomena that have fascinated naturalists for centuries--a fertile new approach to understanding biological systems: the study of self-organization. This book, a primer on self-organization in biological systems for students and other enthusiasts, introduces readers to the basic concepts and tools for studying self-organization and then examines numerous examples of self-organization in the natural world. Self-organization refers to diverse pattern formation processes in the physical and biological world, from sand grains assembling into rippled dunes to cells combining to create highly structured tissues to individual insects working to create sophisticated societies. What these diverse systems hold in common is the proximate means by which they acquire order and structure. In self-organizing systems, pattern at the global level emerges solely from interactions among lower-level components. Remarkably, even very complex structures result from the iteration of surprisingly simple behaviors performed by individuals relying on only local information. This striking conclusion suggests important lines of inquiry: To what degree is environmental rather than individual complexity responsible for group complexity? To what extent have widely differing organisms adopted similar, convergent strategies of pattern formation? How, specifically, has natural selection determined the rules governing interactions within biological systems? Broad in scope, thorough yet accessible, this book is a self-contained introduction to self-organization and complexity in biology--a field of study at the forefront of life sciences research.
Download or read book Self organized Complexity in the Physical Biological and Social Sciences written by Donald Lawson Turcotte and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities written by Ton Jörg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The underlying idea and motive for the book is that the notion of complexity may humanize the social sciences, may conceive the complex human being as more human, and turn reality as assumed in our doing social science into a more complex, that is a richer reality for all. The main focus of this book is on new thinking in complexity, with complexity to be taken as derived from the Latin word complexus: ‘that which is interwoven.’ The trans-disciplinary approach advocated here will be trans-disciplinary in two ways: firstly, by going beyond the separate disciplines within the fields of both natural sciences and social sciences, and, secondly, by going beyond the separate cultures of the natural sciences and of the social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book The Complexity Theory Companion written by Lane Hemaspaandra and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is an accessible, algorithmically oriented guide to some of the most interesting techniques of complexity theory. The book shows that simple algorithms are at the heart of complexity theory. The book is organized by technique rather than by topic. Each chapter focuses on one technique: what it is, and what results and applications it yields.
