THE CONTRIBUTION OF HUMBERTO MATURANA TO THE SCIENCES OF COMPLEXITY AND PSYCHOLOGY ALFREDO B. RUIZ [email protected] Instituto de Terapia Cognitiva, Santiago, Chile This work attempts to present the most important contributions of Humberto R. Maturana to the field of psychology, in an effort to reveal them directly. The main conclusion is that Maturana has expanded the understanding of humanness and therapy through the biology of the observer. Contemporary psychology still appears very much influenced by empiricist paradigms, those that accept a unique and universal reality that is alike for everyone, existing independently from the observer. According to this of thinking, the cognitive abilities of an organism are essentially passive, responding to an external order in which the meaning of things has already been previously and objectively defined. In this view, the human mind evolves essentially as a passive receptor of the external order, which would determine it almost in its entirety (Guidano, 1991b; Ruiz, 1992). The rigid simplicity of this position, however, has entered into a profound crisis in the last 20 years. As result of the conceptual breakdown of this empiricist paradigm, psychology is now witnessing an interdisciplinary convergence, from which a space is opening toward a completely different perspective: that of the science of complexity (Guidano, 1991b; Mahoney, 1991) on the one hand and the biology of cognition (Maturana, 1987) on the other. As these alternative perspectives consider living organisms in terms of their complexity, there is from the very beginning an emphasis on self-determination and self-organization, as well as on the organisms´ open and plastic course of evolution and development (Guidano, 1991). The basic element in this perspective is a change in the notions of reality and of the observer. This has led to a radical shift in the view. Received 18 January 1996; accepted 24 February 1996. I am grateful to Humberto Maturana for his help and support white I was writing this article. Address correspondence to Alfredo B. Ruiz, e-mail [email protected] Published in Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9:283-302, 1996 1 A. B. RUIZ Of the relation between observer and observed, in which access to a unique and independent reality apart from the observer is no longer accepted, and instead the contrary position is considered – that there are as many realities as forms of living emerging from each being (Guidano, 1991 a; Ruiz, 1992) or as many realities as domains of explanations the observer may propose (Maturana, 1987). The contribution of Humberto R. Maturana to the science of complexity is recognized, as well as his influence on the thought and research of many scientists (Mahoney, 1991). When at the end of his life Bateson was asked who else was carrying forward the study of living creatures, he answered that “The center for this study is now in Santiago, Chile, under a man named Maturana” (cited in Dell, 1985, p.5). In the same vein theoreticians and psychotherapists such as Guidano (1991a) and Arciero (1989), referring specifically to Maturana´s views, speak of the Chilean school. The contribution of Maturana´s theory to psychotherapy is also fully recognized. In fact, he is frequently a guest at psychotherapy conferences in Chile and abroad. In addition, his contribution is put forth directly through his teaching in training programs for psychotherapists at several institutes in Chile. The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the more important aspects of Maturana´s contributions to psychology and psychotherapy. THE BIOLOGICAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AS A UNITARY EXPLANATORY SYSTEM OF LIFE As previously mentioned an interdisciplinary convergence has led to epistemological changes in the relation of observer and observed. The contribution of Maturana to this new epistemological proposition is fundamental. He is, along with Lorenz (1973), among the first biological scientists to propose that knowledge is a biological phenomenon that can only be studied and known as such and who have developed a fully biological theory consistent with this view. Furthermore, Maturana proposed that life itself should be understood as a process of knowing, in the realization of living in congruence with the medium. Maturana´s work can therefore be characterized as a unitary ontological explanatory system of life and human experiencing. It is ontological because it visualizes human experience from a point of view situated within the conditions of the constitution of humanness and not from an external view, and it is explanatory because it proposes a view of the relational dynamics that generate cognitive phenomena. As Maturana´s approach emerges from his understanding of biological systems, it leads us to reflect on the basic conditions that permit us to explain everything that occurs in life as a phenomenon of living. From this point of view, psychology is part of biology because the phenomena it studies occur in the process of living of human beings. At the same time, Maturana has recognized that psychology has its own domain – the study of the dynamic relations and interactions occurring between whole organisms – and he has not attempted a reductionist approach (Maturana, 1995). In Maturana´s thinking, the mind is a phenomenon that pertains to the relational dynamics of the organism. In his view, the mind, as a relational phenomenon, arises in the relation between the organisms and the medium in the same way that walking arises from the movement of the legs in relation to the ground or as a body displacement. Maturana has also proposed that because the human nervous system changes along with the growth of the child (and during the whole life of the person) in a manner contingent to his or her living in language, languaging behavior is generated even when humans are alone. Moreover, it is possible and it so happens that in our human solitude we can have experiences that we can distinguish as mental experiences because they make sense in our domain of relations as languaging beings. 2 This view of mind, and this general manner of thinking of Maturana, has incalculable consequences for psychotherapy. To start with, any emerging in human systems from the intervention of a psychotherapist is always to be understood as a reorganization of the experience of the patient determined by the patient himself or herself and not by the therapist. Thus, the therapist can only generate perturbations in the patient that may trigger his or her mental reorganization but never specify it. Directly said, the therapist can only trigger, but not specify, what happens in the patient. EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS I suggested earlier that what Maturana has proposed is an explanatory theory of human experience. For this reason I now analyze how he has dealt with the following epistemological problems: scientific explanation, structural determinism, and living beings as structurally determined systems. Scientific Explanations According to Maturana (1987, 1990), a scientific explanation consists of the proposition of a process or mechanism which, if left to operate, gives rise in the domain of experiences of the observer to the experience that he or she wants to explain, in a way that satisfies what Maturana has termed criterion of validation of scientific explanations. This criterion of validation requires satisfaction of the following four conditions: 1. Description of what an observer must do to live the experience to be explained. 2. Proposition of a generative mechanism that if allowed to operate generates in the observer the experience to be explained. 3. Deduction of other possible experiences from all the operational coherences entailed in (2) and of what an observer must do to live them. 4. The realization of what is deduced in (3); if this happens, Point 3 becomes a scientific explanation. The application of the criterion of validation of a scientific explanations has two basic consequences: (a) The experience of the phenomenon to be explained and the generative mechanism belong to two nonintersecting phenomenal domains, and (b) scientific explanation does not constitute a phenomenal reduction and is constitutively nonreductionistic. Accordingly, if my propose was to provide a scientific explanation of how psychotherapy works. I would have to propose a generative mechanism for the therapeutic effects in the context of the satisfaction of the criterion of validation of a scientific explanation. The Notion of Structural Determinism According to Maturana, every explanatory argument is founded on an implicit acceptance of the notion of structural determinism. That is, it is founded on the understanding that the operation of every system, both in its internal dynamics and in its relational dynamics, depends on its structure. The notion of structural determinism is a descriptive abstraction of the coherence of the experiences of the observer in his or her operation as a living being and of what the observer does as he or she reflects on the regularities of experience in living 3 as he or she tries to explain them. Even the notion of probability has value only in the implicit or acceptance that an observer operates in a background domain of structural determinism that is directly unobservable. The notions of system and mechanism imply in themselves the notion of structural determinism. Scientific explanations are founded on structural determinism, as they consist of the proposition of generative mechanisms that if left to operate give rise to the experiences to be explained (Maturana, 1990). Every system operates according to its structure, that is, according to how it is made, in the interplay of the properties of its components. A system operating in this manner is a structurally determined system. The structure of such a system determines everything that occurs in it or to it in terms of its internal changes as well as in terms of its internal changes as well as in terms of what it can encounter in an interaction (Maturana & Mpodozis, 1992).