Theoretical Perspective: Systemic

Historical Roots

Depending on viewpoints, different developmental pathways of the systemic approach can be identified such as (i) family therapy schools, (ii) solution focused and resource oriented concepts of clinical practice, and (iii) the dynamic systems approach in complexity science. The first two grew up on the soil of psychotherapy practice whereas the third belongs to the field of formal and empirical sciences. Family therapy as well as solution-focused approaches intend to stimulate changes of individual or interpersonal patterns (patterns of feeling, thinking, behaving, and of social communication). In order to do this, they need an idea of how complex systems create and transform such patterns. In the last [Page 1024]two decades, the theories and methodologies of complex dynamic systems were used to get such ideas. Surrounding the concept of self-organization, theories and assessment tools provided the basis for empirical research on psychotherapy change processes.

Basic Assumptions

The systemic approach focuses on dynamics, interconnectedness, and complexity of psychological, physiological, and social phenomena. Its look at the world adopts the perspective of time, development, and pattern transitions. This look is qualified by its structure of knowledge and its methodological approaches, not by the ‘objects’ or the phenomena under consideration (e.g. families). This perspective refers to interpersonal constellations such as couples, families, or social groups in so far as features like dynamics and complexity are at the core of diagnostic interest. The mere classification of social units into categorical or dimensional systems does not fulfil any criteria of systemic assessment procedures. The feeling, thinking, and behaving of individuals is also at the core of interest, as well as (individual or coupled) brain dynamics.

Qualities of social systems like interactional styles, dyadic coping, expressed emotions, cohesiveness and many others are of interest, if they can be seen as a result of dynamic processes. In terms of self-organization theory these qualities are collective order parameters of a social system, reducing the degrees of freedom of behaviours and cognitions of the system members (subsystems or components). Components become part of coherent patterns which are determining their behaviour (top-down causality), but the other way round, interactions between components constitute emergent patterns and qualities not yet existing at the level of components (bottom-up causality). Global qualities can also act as constraints and/or boundary conditions of the realized system dynamics – more or less in touch with these dynamics and so themselves more or less prone to change.

If individual or socially shared cognitions can be seen as self-organized products of such circular causalities between micro- and macro-level dynamics, social as well as individual constructivism finds its theoretical foundation in the systemic processes of self-organization. Spontaneous order formation in brains, minds, and societies is the basis of meaningful constructions or ‘Gestalts’, and this is the reason why constructivist and systemic procedures of assessment share quite similar epistemological backgrounds.

Visual Representations of Interpersonal Constellations

Well-known visualization tools like family genograms, sociomatrices based on preference choices between group members, structural models of relationship qualities or group and family sculptures (incorporated by real individuals or realized by symbols like coins or Szeno Test figurines, as in the method of family boards) are widely used in systemic therapy (cf. Cierpka, 1996; Schiepek, 1991, 1999). Following our taxonomy, these procedures usually are realized for practical purposes and will be found at the static and qualitative end of the axes. They are systemic only in as far as they try to portray the complexity of interpersonal constellations, but in a first step, any information of dynamic qualities is missing. In a second step, however, they help to initiate communicative and emotional dynamics within the portrayed social system, and – applied repeatedly and entering by this an iterative cycle between representation and action – they play an important role in supporting therapeutic change processes.

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