Lernzettel: Systemic Psychology

📋 Course Outline

1. Systemic View of Relationship Conflict
2. Theoretical Foundations and Communication Axioms
3. Interpersonal Processes and Influence
4. Perceptions and Social Perspectives
5. Type One and Type Two Change
6. Major Systemic Schools
7. Structural and Contextual Approaches
8. Contemporary Systemic Therapies
9. Therapy Process and Therapeutic Alliance
10. Systemic Intervention Tools

📖 1. Systemic View of Relationship Conflict

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Metacommunication : Communication about both the content of an exchange and the way that exchange affects the relationship between the participants.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Systemic psychology distinguishes the content of an exchange from the relational dynamics surrounding it, with conflicts often involving an escalation in which each person attempts to dominate the other.

Further detail

• Systemic psychology can be practiced individually, with families or groups, and with couples.

💡 Memory Hook

Content, relationship, power

📖 2. Theoretical Foundations and Communication Axioms

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• General systems theory : Examines the interactions between the different parts of a system.
• Cybernetics : Studies systems of control and communication.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Family and systemic therapy focuses primarily on relational dynamics within the family, whereas the psychoanalytic paradigm focuses mainly on the individual patient.

📌 Every communication has a content level that conveys information and a relationship level that indicates how the message should be understood and defines the relationship between the interlocutors.

📌 Digital communication uses words mainly to transmit information or knowledge, whereas analogical communication includes nonverbal elements such as posture, gestures, facial expressions, vocal inflection, rhythm, and intonation and mainly defines relationships.

📌 A symmetrical interaction is based on equality and mirrored behavior, whereas a complementary interaction is based on difference, with each person’s behavior completing and reinforcing the other’s role.

📌 It is impossible not to communicate because every behavior, including silence, inactivity, or ignoring someone, conveys a message.

📌 Communication sequences are punctuated differently by participants because each person tends to see their own behavior as a response to the other while underestimating its influence on that other person.

Further detail

• The systemic movement developed mainly in the United States during the twentieth century and was influenced by Von Bertalanffy, cybernetics, and Gregory Bateson of Palo Alto.

💡 Memory Hook

Cannot not communicate

📖 3. Interpersonal Processes and Influence

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Relational interdependence : Means that each person continually influences the other while also being influenced by that person’s emotions, cognitions, and behaviors.
• Alienation : Appears when a person receives insufficient recognition from others for their inner experience, including emotions, thoughts, and intentions.

📝 Essential Points

📌 A person’s influence on another depends on the meaning the other person assigns to observable behavior and its context, rather than solely on the first person’s internal intention.

📌 A sense of relational influence is different from a sense of control because a person can affect the relationship but cannot control the other person.

🔄 Process — The Kinderman model explains psychological problems as the result of interactions among biological, social, and circumstantial factors that affect individual and interpersonal psychological processes and can generate secondary problems.

💡 Memory Hook

Mutual influence, not control

📖 4. Perceptions and Social Perspectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social representations : Shared meanings within a society and culture that form the symbolic space in which people think, feel, and act.
• Social perspectives : Result from combining interpersonal perceptions with social representations and describe how shared norms and taken-for-granted meanings influence personal interpretations and everyday exchanges.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Direct interpersonal perceptions express what a person thinks about themselves or another person, whereas indirect perceptions concern what a person thinks another person thinks about them or about someone else.

• Interpersonal conflicts often arise from indirect perceptions, which are frequently treated by clients as truths rather than interpretations.

Further detail

📌 Social perspectives are normative, multiple perspectives can coexist on the same subject, and these perspectives form and change through everyday dialogue over time.

💡 Memory Hook

Interpretations meet norms

📖 5. Type One and Type Two Change

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Type One Change : Uses familiar solutions that may sometimes worsen a problem by increasing the frequency of the behavior they are intended to reduce.
• Type Two Change : Unexpected, contrary to common sense, and contains an enigmatic element that disrupts habitual reaction patterns.

📝 Essential Points

• In a coercive-refusal escalation, one person becomes directive and coercive, the other responds with refusal, and that refusal intensifies the first person’s behavior in a vicious circle.

💡 Memory Hook

More of the same versus surprise

📖 6. Major Systemic Schools

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Double bind : Occurs when a person is subjected to two contradictory or incompatible pressures, such as the paradoxical injunction to be spontaneous.
• Symptom function : In Haley’s strategic approach, a symptom can function as a relational tactic that influences others and helps organize or solve difficulties within the relationship.
• Illegitimate alliance : Occurs in a three-level hierarchy when the person in the higher position allies with the person in the lower position and disqualifies the intermediate person.
• Two-generation conflict : A form of family pathology rooted in a conflict involving two generations, and sometimes three.

📝 Essential Points

📌 The Palo Alto school holds that the therapist’s personal work and interpretive filter affect therapy, while repetitive feedback loops maintain difficulties until the relational context or patients’ situation changes.

📌 For Jay Haley, a psychiatric symptom exists when the patient’s behavior strongly influences others and the patient presents themselves as unable to act otherwise or lacking control.

💡 Memory Hook

Palo Alto, Haley, Milan

📖 7. Structural and Contextual Approaches

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Family boundary : Defines who belongs to a family subsystem and organizes interactions both within that subsystem and with the outside.
• Family script : A shared set of expectations and repetitive interactions specifying how roles should be performed in particular contexts.
• Ethical balance : In Boszormenyi-Nagy’s contextual approach, ethical balance represents the merits and debts exchanged within a relationship, including children’s vertical loyalty to their parents.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Clear and flexible boundaries permit exchanges with the outside while preserving the subsystem’s integrity, stability, and balance; rigid boundaries restrict exchanges, whereas diffuse boundaries weaken integrity and make roles difficult to define.

📌 Replicative scripts repeat patterns from the family of origin, corrective scripts consciously oppose childhood patterns, and creative or improvised scripts develop new ways of acting when previous scripts no longer fit.

🔄 Process — The family life cycle describes how a family changes through stages and life events, with transitions potentially producing crises, increasing stress, and requiring a new balance.

Further detail

🔄 Process — Family-script rewriting proceeds through representation of a script as a model, preparation by recovering information from the past, and improvisation by testing new ways of acting.

💡 Memory Hook

Boundaries, scripts, loyalties

📖 8. Contemporary Systemic Therapies

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Contemporary systemic psychology questions simplistic uses of circular causality in intimate-partner violence because linking both partners’ behaviors can reduce the responsibility of the aggressor, whose personality may play a greater role in initiating and maintaining violence.

📌 A well-functioning couple requires balance among commitment, intimacy, and passion, and jointly improving stress management supports relationship satisfaction and durability.

• The Milan school, founded by Mara Selvini-Palazzoli, emphasizes that the meaning of a behavior depends on the context in which it occurs.

🔄 Process — Narrative re-authoring involves identifying recent actions, connecting them to personal values, finding similar actions across one’s past, drawing conclusions about identity, and imagining future expressions of those values.

Further detail

• Systemic therapies use research-validated models and interventions, follow patients longitudinally, and may include follow-up for 3 to 12 months according to Gurman (2001).

• Systemic interventions may be individual, couple-based, or family-based and can target specific difficulties such as infidelity, intimate-partner violence, adolescent depression, or adult alcoholism.

💡 Memory Hook

Context and lasting change

📖 9. Therapy Process and Therapeutic Alliance

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Therapeutic alliance : The collaborative relationship that supports systemic therapy and may involve multiple or indirect alliances among the therapist and family members.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 The therapeutic alliance consists of a relational bond, agreement on therapy goals, and consensus about the therapist’s interventions and the patients’ tasks.

🔄 Process — Systemic therapy proceeds through appointment planning, evaluation, therapy, and disengagement, during which sessions are spaced out and achieved changes, their durability, and future challenges are discussed.

Further detail

• Evaluation may use an evaluation contract, questionnaires, a genogram, individual or subgroup sessions, and the construction of a therapeutic alliance.

• Friedlander and Escudero’s System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances is a clinically validated tool for assessing the therapeutic alliance.

💡 Memory Hook

Link, goals, tasks

📖 10. Systemic Intervention Tools

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Genogram : A graphic representation of a family that connects the present with past family events and emotionally transmitted material across generations.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 The family coat of arms explores family values, strengths, and history; the genogram maps family relationships, conflicts, and significant events; sculpting represents relationships and roles through physical positioning; and video feedback reviews recorded interactions.

📌 A genogram can be read structurally for family composition, relationally for affective links, alliances, coalitions, and triangulations, and functionally for each member’s role and management of life stages.

📌 The horizontal perspective examines the family context in the present, whereas the vertical perspective traces several generations to identify repetitive patterns without adopting a deterministic view.

Further detail

📌 A secret that transpires is known only by some family members but creates enough discomfort for others to sense dysfunction, whereas a shared secret is known by everyone without each person knowing that the others know.

💡 Memory Hook

Map, sculpt, review

📊 Synthesis Tables

Systemic Communication Axioms

Axiom	Core distinction	Relational implication
1	One cannot not communicate	Every behavior conveys meaning
2	Content and relationship	The same information can define different relationships
3	Punctuation of sequences	Each person may see themselves only as responding
4	Digital and analogical	Words transmit information while nonverbal signs define relationships
5	Symmetrical and complementary	Interactions are organized by equality or difference

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Confusions

1. A conflict is not limited to the literal subject being discussed; it may also concern power within the relationship.
2. General systems theory is not limited to studying isolated individuals.
3. The model does not attribute psychological problems to a single factor.
4. Indirect perceptions are interpretations, even though clients often experience them as objective truths.
5. A Type One solution can maintain or intensify the problem instead of resolving it.
6. The double bind involves incompatible demands, not merely two difficult demands.
7. Rigid and diffuse boundaries are different dysfunctions: one restricts contact and the other weakens internal definition.