Fractals appear on the connecting edges of EVERYTHING – Food for Thought

Fractals are recursive patterns–repeating but never the same–that appear on the connecting edges of everything. Objects, gasses, solids, ecosystems, relationships, and human consciousness all have fractal edges where novelty arises out of the meeting between rigidity and chaos. The advance into novelty that Teilhard de Chardin described, the evolutionary wave, and the natural tendency of complex systems to create deeper complexity all involve fractal boundaries generating novelty and deeper coherence. In psychotherapy, the therapist cocreates fractal boundaries with clients in the intersubjective fields of the session. The therapist maintains the intent and focus on the client’s growth, and that fractal boundary, influenced by the coherent intent of the therapist and client interacting with the client’s defensive resistance to change, biases the fractal boundary to produce novelty and coherence in the direction of health, development, and love. This is a central mechanism for all therapy and an explicit agenda for Integrally Informed Psychotherapy and elucidated in my own Developmental Engagement Field Theory (DEFT) described in the journal article of the same name in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice.