Systemic Therapy
Encyclopedia
Systemic therapy is a form of psychotherapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...

 which seeks to address people not on individual level, as had been the focus of earlier forms of therapy, but as people in relationship, dealing with the interactions of groups and their interactional patterns and dynamics.

History

Systemic therapy has its roots in family therapy
Family therapy
Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...

, or more precisely family systems therapy as it later came to be known. In particular, systemic therapy traces its roots to the Milan school of Mara Selvini Palazzoli
Mara Selvini Palazzoli
Mara Selvini Palazzoli was an Italian psychiatrist and founder in 1971, with Gianfranco Cecchin, Luigi Boscolo and Giuliana Prata, of the systemic and constructivist approach to family therapy which became known as the Milan systems approach. Worked with families of schizophrenic and anorexic...

, but also derives from the work of Salvador Minuchin
Salvador Minuchin
Salvador Minuchin is a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Ríos, Argentina. He developed Structural Family Therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family. These charts represent power dynamics...

, Murray Bowen
Murray Bowen
Murray Bowen, M.D., was an American psychiatrist and a professor in Psychiatry at the Georgetown University. Bowen was among the pioneers of family therapy and founders of systemic therapy...

, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
Ivan Böszörményi-Nagy
Ivan Böszörményi-Nagy was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and one of the founders of the field of family therapy. He emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1950....

, as well as Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir was an American author and psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations...

 and Jay Haley
Jay Haley
Jay Douglas Haley was one of the founding figures of brief and family therapy in general and of the strategic model of psychotherapy, and he was one of the more accomplished teachers, clinical supervisors, and authors in these disciplines.-Life and works:Conceived in a log cabin on his family's...

 from MRI
Mental Research Institute
The Palo Alto Mental Research Institute is one of the founding institutions of brief and family therapy. Founded by Don D. Jackson and colleagues in 1959, MRI has been one of the leading sources of ideas in the area of interactional/systemic studies, psychotherapy, and family...

 in Palo Alto. These early schools of family therapy represented therapeutic adaptations of the larger interdisciplinary field of systems theory
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...

 which first originated in the fields of biology and physiology.

Early forms of systemic therapy were based on cybernetics
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

. In the 1970s this understanding of systems theory
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...

 was central to the structural (Minuchin)
Salvador Minuchin
Salvador Minuchin is a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Ríos, Argentina. He developed Structural Family Therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family. These charts represent power dynamics...

 and strategic (Haley, Selvini Palazzoli) schools of family therapy which would later develop into systemic therapy. In the light of postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

 critique, the notion that one could control systems or say objectively “what is” came increasingly into question. Based largely on the work of anthropologists Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe...

 and Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....

, this resulted in a shift towards what is known as “second order cybernetics” which acknowledges the influence of the subjective observer in any study, essentially applying the principles of cybernetics to cybernetics – examining the examination.

As a result, the focus of systemic therapy (ca. 1980 and forward) has moved away from a modernist model of linear causality and understanding of reality as objective, to a postmodern understanding of reality as socially and linguistically constructed
Social constructionism
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. A social construction is a concept or practice that is the construct of a particular group...

.

Praxis of systemic therapy

This has a direct impact on the praxis of systemic therapy which approaches problems practically rather than analytically
Analysis
Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle , though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.The word is...

, i.e. it does not attempt to determine past causes as does the psychoanalytic
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 approach, nor does it assign diagnosis (who is sick, who is a victim), rather systemic therapy seeks instead to identify stagnant patterns of behavior in groups of people such as a family, and address those patterns directly, irrespective of analysis of cause. A key point here of this postmodern perspective then is not a denial of absolutes, but far more a humility and recognition on the part of the therapist that they do not hold the power to change people or systems, rather the systemic therapist's role is to help systems to change themselves by introducing creative “nudges”,

“Systemic therapy neither attempts a 'treatment of causes' nor of symptoms, rather it gives living systems nudges that help them to develop new patterns together, taking on a new organizational structure that allows growth.”

Thus systemic therapy differs from analytic forms of therapy, including psychoanalytic or psychodynamic
Psychodynamics
Psychodynamics is the theory and systematic study of the psychological forces that underlie human behavior, especially the dynamic relations between conscious motivation and unconscious motivation...

 forms of family therapy
Family therapy
Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...

 (for example the work of Horst Eberhard Richter) in systemic therapy's focus on practically addressing current relationship patterns rather than analyzing causes such as subconscious
Subconscious
The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....

 impulses or childhood trauma
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...

. Systemic therapy also differs from family systems therapy in that it addresses other living systems (i.e. groups of people) in addition to the family, for example businesses. In addition to families and business, the systemic approach is increasingly being implemented in the fields of education, politics, psychiatry, social work, and family medicine.

See also

  • List of therapies
  • Systems theory
    Systems theory
    Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...

  • Family therapy
    Family therapy
    Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...

  • Systemic coaching
  • Systems psychology
    Systems psychology
    Systems psychology is a branch of applied psychology that studies human behaviour and experience in complex systems. It is inspired by systems theory and systems thinking, and based on the theoretical work of Roger Barker, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and others. It is an approach in...

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