Epistemologías · 1948

Systemic thinking / Cybernetics

Systemic thinking and cybernetics shift the focus from the isolated individual towards the systems in which human experience is organised: families, couples, groups, institutions, communication networks and sociocultural contexts. From this perspective, a psychological problem is understood not merely as the internal property of a person, but as part of a relational pattern maintained through recurrent interactions, explicit and implicit rules, roles, boundaries, hierarchies, feedback circuits and shared ways of attributing meaning. General systems theory contributed a way of thinking in terms of wholeness, organisation, interdependence and regulation. Cybernetics added attention to processes of feedback, homeostasis, circular causality, information and control. In psychotherapy, this made it possible to abandon linear explanations of the “A causes B” type and to think clinically in circular sequences: how each behaviour responds to another, amplifies it, compensates for it or stabilises it within a broader relational organisation. First-order cybernetics tends to place the observer outside the observed system: the therapist looks at the family system, identifies patterns, rules, coalitions, hierarchies or maintaining circuits, and may intervene strategically or structurally. Second-order cybernetics introduces a decisive turn: the observer is part of the system they observe. This profoundly alters the clinical position, because the therapist is no longer understood as a neutral external expert, but as a participant who co-constructs descriptions, distinctions, questions and possibilities within the therapeutic system. This framework helps to understand structural and strategic family therapy, the Palo Alto school, the Milan school, Bowen, contemporary systemic therapy, systemic couple therapy, the reflecting team and some collaborative and postmodern forms of practice. It is neither a technique nor a specific treatment, but a way of thinking about clinical causality, relationship, change, observation and context.