![]() Families may organize themselves into subsystems to accomplish the tasks and goals of the family. Each subsystem is distinguished by the members who comprise the subsystem as well as the tasks or focus of the subsystem. Practitioners generally have focused on three primary subsystems: marital (or couple), parental, and sibling. ![]() Such subsystems are often organized by gender or generation. The concept of hierarchies describes how families organize themselves into various smaller units or subsystems that together comprise the larger family system (Minuchin 1974). It is more than "who makes up a family," it is how they come together that defines that family. It is how these elements combined to form something larger than the ingredients that makes the cake. The cake that comes out of the oven is more than the eggs, flour, oil, baking soda, and vanilla that make up the parts or elements of the cake. A common analogy often used by family systems theorists and practitioners is found in baking. By studying them individually, the way they interact, their communication, or their humor, their uniqueness is lost or clouded. In contrast, a nonsystems approach would attempt to understand each family by looking at the individual members separately. Yet it is in their rules of interacting with each other and their collective history that they are understood as uniquely different. Two families living across the street from each other may each be comprised of a mother, father, and child. A family systems approach argues that in order to understand a family system we must look at the family as a whole. Critical to this premise is the concept of holism. One of the central premises of family systems theory is that family systems organize themselves to carry out the daily challenges and tasks of life, as well as adjusting to the developmental needs of its members. Family systems theory allows one to understand the organizational complexity of families, as well as the interactive patterns that guide family interactions. The application of the systems perspective has particular relevance to the study of the family as families are comprised of individual members who share a history, have some degree of emotional bonding, and develop strategies for meeting the needs of individual members and the family as a group (Anderson and Sabatelli 1999). ![]() A systems perspective permits one to see how a change in one component of the system affects the other components of the system, which in turns affects the initial component. ![]() Rather than just focusing on each of the separate parts, a systems perspective focuses on the connectedness and the interrelation and interdependence of all the parts. By the close of the twentieth century family systems theory had become one of the major theoretical foundations guiding empirical investigations into the study of families and from which clinical interventions and programmatic work with families were being developed.Ī general systems perspective examines the way components of a system interact with one another to form a whole. Von Bertalanffy's work on general systems theory found wide applicability in such fields as community planning, computer science and programming, and the social sciences. Such an approach shifted from a linear causal model to models that required a broader, holistic orientation in order to understand fully the dynamics involved. Instead of the mechanistic models of the time, von Bertalanffy's general systems theory argued that organisms are complex, organized, and interactive. Family systems theory's heritage emerged from the work of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's work on general systems theory which offered the world of the mid-twentieth century a different way of viewing science.
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