PYC4808- Ecosystemic Psychology NOTES: Some
Questions andAnswers from Past Papers 2023
ECOSYSTEMIC PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE – TWO DIFFERENT WORLD VIEWS
1. Individual Psychology VS. Family Systems Theory
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
- Westernized roots
- Western, Lockean, scientiic tradition
- Socialised in this way of thinking – consistent with our communities + our culture
- Lockean – Modernism = linear causality (A causes B)
- Reality is out there, outside our minds and the truth is to be discovered
- OBJECTIVE reality – break down into smaller components and uncover laws according to which
the world operates
- Pursue knowledge by means of OBSERVATION + EXPERIMENTATION
- These results = measurable + objective
- The subject (observing) remain separate from object and be value free
SYSTEMIC FAMILY THERAPY
- ‘’Counter-cultural’’ – contradicts traditional ways of thinking
- Directs attention away from the individual and from problems viewed in isolation and directs our
focus to relationships and relationship issues between individuals
- Kantian tradition
- Observer = attention
- Subjectivity is inevitable = exitinng in the mind and not the external world of the client
- Observer acts on, and participates in creating his or her own reality
- “Non-causal dialectical process of mutual influence in which both have influence”
- A and B exist
- Reciprocity = give-and-take actions
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY SYSTEM FAMILY THERAPY
Asks, Why?? Asks, What?
Linear cause and efect Reciprocal Causality
Subject / object dualism Dialectical
Either or dichotomies Holistic
Value-free science Subjectiie / Perceptual
Deterministic / Reactiie Freedom of choice / pro-actiie
Laws and law like external reality Patterns
Historical Focus Here and now focus
Indiiidualistic Relational
Reductionistic Contextual
Absolutistic Relatiiistic
1|Page
, 2. Definitions
Epistemology = A set of immanent rules used in thought by large groups of people to define reality.
How knowledge is created.
Theory = A set of connected principles serving to explain a group of phenomena of interest to the
researcher or serving as a statement of relations believed to prevail in a body of observations.
Theories are informed and specified by particular epistemologies.
Model = A projection of the substance of a less understood or developed domain onto the structure
of a more developed system. You take what you see and project it onto something else.
Technique = A rehearsed or practiced procedure or skill to achieve a particular end/ outcome in
accordance with a model used.
Cybernetics = The characteristics of the systemic / cybernetic world is theoretical relativity. We
cannot reject one theory and embrace another. Rather, cybernetics we recognize that each theory
gives meaning to the other and that each has utility relative to given context.
2|Page
, CHAPTER TWO – THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
1930’s & 1940’s
Cybernetics – Early on = organisation, pattern, and process rather than matter, material and content.
Norbert Weiner (Mathematician) = Named the science – cybernetics
1940 = scientists started to compare inanimate machines with living organisms.
Gregory Bateson
Anthropologist = studies human cultures, traditions, origins, behaviours and societies.
Main contribution was grounds of knowledge and epistemology.
Bridging physical and behavioural science.
Bateson resolved the ancient problem posed by dualistic thinking about mind and body – he set
about translating the practice of psychiatry into a theory of human communication.
1950’s & 1960’s
Conferences called “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” ->
changed to CYBERNETICS
Bateson’s Double-Blind Hypothesis (1956) – toward a theory of schizophrenia
- Two or more persons, one designated “the victim”
- Repeated experiences
- A primary negative injunction (command, ruling)
- A secondary injection conflicting the 1st at a more abstract level, and like the 1st, enforced by
punishments or signals which threaten survival
- A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field
- All ingredients are NO LONGER necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his
universe in double-blind patterns
Primarily mothers part of the problem – mother-blaming
Nathan Ackerman
Child psychiatrist – family as a social and emotional unit
Both mother and child go to therapy together not separate
1962 = published Family Process
Combination of psychodynamics and the notion of an individual’s social role to understand the
ongoing interaction between hereditary and environment and the maintenance of homeostasis
within and between the person, family, and ultimately society.
Murray Bowen
3|Page
, He introduces triangulation, intergenerational transmission, diferentiation of self, and ultimately
undiferentiated family ego mass.
Classic study – entire families of schizophrenic patients are hospitalised
Carl Whittaker
Psychiatrist – started working with John Warkentin as a co-therapy team
Eventually involve spouses and children of patients as part of their treatment approach
Highly unorthodox yet brilliantly efective approach
Theodore Lidz
Studies neurology – schizophrenia
Rejects Freudian notion (of fixation at oral stage)
Rejects schizophrenia is caused by maternal rejection
Moves away from individual to emphasis on family dysfunction
Lyman Wynne
Significance of family in schizophrenia, relationships = important, communication patterns
o Pseudomutuality = A relationship between two persons in which conflict of views or opinions
is solved by simply ignoring it.
o Psuedohostility = Superficial alienation of family members that masks members’ need for
intimacy and afection
o Rubber fence = Characteristic process through which a family experiences itself, and is
perceived by others, as if it were within an elastic boundary that helps the family members
to maintain a sense of tolerable relatedness and to decrease the threat of divergence from
within and intrusion from without
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
Psychiatrist – psychoanalytic training
Works on impact of intergenerational processes, introduces ethical dimension to therapy
Trust + loyalty
John Elderkin Bell
See families conjointly, stumbled upon accidentally.
Family Group Therapy = published 1961
1950’s Brought Us
- Happened in aftermath of WW2
- Beginning of counter cultural movement
- Hippie generation + start of civil rights + ecology movement
- Schizophrenia research was granted money – current theories did not provide a solution
4|Page
Questions andAnswers from Past Papers 2023
ECOSYSTEMIC PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE – TWO DIFFERENT WORLD VIEWS
1. Individual Psychology VS. Family Systems Theory
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
- Westernized roots
- Western, Lockean, scientiic tradition
- Socialised in this way of thinking – consistent with our communities + our culture
- Lockean – Modernism = linear causality (A causes B)
- Reality is out there, outside our minds and the truth is to be discovered
- OBJECTIVE reality – break down into smaller components and uncover laws according to which
the world operates
- Pursue knowledge by means of OBSERVATION + EXPERIMENTATION
- These results = measurable + objective
- The subject (observing) remain separate from object and be value free
SYSTEMIC FAMILY THERAPY
- ‘’Counter-cultural’’ – contradicts traditional ways of thinking
- Directs attention away from the individual and from problems viewed in isolation and directs our
focus to relationships and relationship issues between individuals
- Kantian tradition
- Observer = attention
- Subjectivity is inevitable = exitinng in the mind and not the external world of the client
- Observer acts on, and participates in creating his or her own reality
- “Non-causal dialectical process of mutual influence in which both have influence”
- A and B exist
- Reciprocity = give-and-take actions
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY SYSTEM FAMILY THERAPY
Asks, Why?? Asks, What?
Linear cause and efect Reciprocal Causality
Subject / object dualism Dialectical
Either or dichotomies Holistic
Value-free science Subjectiie / Perceptual
Deterministic / Reactiie Freedom of choice / pro-actiie
Laws and law like external reality Patterns
Historical Focus Here and now focus
Indiiidualistic Relational
Reductionistic Contextual
Absolutistic Relatiiistic
1|Page
, 2. Definitions
Epistemology = A set of immanent rules used in thought by large groups of people to define reality.
How knowledge is created.
Theory = A set of connected principles serving to explain a group of phenomena of interest to the
researcher or serving as a statement of relations believed to prevail in a body of observations.
Theories are informed and specified by particular epistemologies.
Model = A projection of the substance of a less understood or developed domain onto the structure
of a more developed system. You take what you see and project it onto something else.
Technique = A rehearsed or practiced procedure or skill to achieve a particular end/ outcome in
accordance with a model used.
Cybernetics = The characteristics of the systemic / cybernetic world is theoretical relativity. We
cannot reject one theory and embrace another. Rather, cybernetics we recognize that each theory
gives meaning to the other and that each has utility relative to given context.
2|Page
, CHAPTER TWO – THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
1930’s & 1940’s
Cybernetics – Early on = organisation, pattern, and process rather than matter, material and content.
Norbert Weiner (Mathematician) = Named the science – cybernetics
1940 = scientists started to compare inanimate machines with living organisms.
Gregory Bateson
Anthropologist = studies human cultures, traditions, origins, behaviours and societies.
Main contribution was grounds of knowledge and epistemology.
Bridging physical and behavioural science.
Bateson resolved the ancient problem posed by dualistic thinking about mind and body – he set
about translating the practice of psychiatry into a theory of human communication.
1950’s & 1960’s
Conferences called “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” ->
changed to CYBERNETICS
Bateson’s Double-Blind Hypothesis (1956) – toward a theory of schizophrenia
- Two or more persons, one designated “the victim”
- Repeated experiences
- A primary negative injunction (command, ruling)
- A secondary injection conflicting the 1st at a more abstract level, and like the 1st, enforced by
punishments or signals which threaten survival
- A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field
- All ingredients are NO LONGER necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his
universe in double-blind patterns
Primarily mothers part of the problem – mother-blaming
Nathan Ackerman
Child psychiatrist – family as a social and emotional unit
Both mother and child go to therapy together not separate
1962 = published Family Process
Combination of psychodynamics and the notion of an individual’s social role to understand the
ongoing interaction between hereditary and environment and the maintenance of homeostasis
within and between the person, family, and ultimately society.
Murray Bowen
3|Page
, He introduces triangulation, intergenerational transmission, diferentiation of self, and ultimately
undiferentiated family ego mass.
Classic study – entire families of schizophrenic patients are hospitalised
Carl Whittaker
Psychiatrist – started working with John Warkentin as a co-therapy team
Eventually involve spouses and children of patients as part of their treatment approach
Highly unorthodox yet brilliantly efective approach
Theodore Lidz
Studies neurology – schizophrenia
Rejects Freudian notion (of fixation at oral stage)
Rejects schizophrenia is caused by maternal rejection
Moves away from individual to emphasis on family dysfunction
Lyman Wynne
Significance of family in schizophrenia, relationships = important, communication patterns
o Pseudomutuality = A relationship between two persons in which conflict of views or opinions
is solved by simply ignoring it.
o Psuedohostility = Superficial alienation of family members that masks members’ need for
intimacy and afection
o Rubber fence = Characteristic process through which a family experiences itself, and is
perceived by others, as if it were within an elastic boundary that helps the family members
to maintain a sense of tolerable relatedness and to decrease the threat of divergence from
within and intrusion from without
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
Psychiatrist – psychoanalytic training
Works on impact of intergenerational processes, introduces ethical dimension to therapy
Trust + loyalty
John Elderkin Bell
See families conjointly, stumbled upon accidentally.
Family Group Therapy = published 1961
1950’s Brought Us
- Happened in aftermath of WW2
- Beginning of counter cultural movement
- Hippie generation + start of civil rights + ecology movement
- Schizophrenia research was granted money – current theories did not provide a solution
4|Page
