Personality systematics

Historical background

Systems psychology has emerged here as a new approach in which groups and individuals, are considered as systems in homeostasis. Within open systems they have an active method of remaining stable through the dynamic relationship between parts. A classic example of this homeostatic dynamic is the "problem behavior" of a bed wetting child having a stabilizing function of holding a troubled marriage together because the attention of the parents is drawn away from their conflict towards the "problem" child.

More recent developments in systems psychology have challenged this understanding of homeostasis as being too focused on causal understanding of systems. This change in thought from 1st order cybernetics to 2nd order cybernetics involved a postmodern shift in understanding of reality as objective to being socially and linguistically constructed.

Family systems therapy received an important boost in the mid-1950s through the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson and colleagues – Jay Haley, Donald D. Jackson, John Weakland, William Fry, and later, Virginia Satir, Paul Watzlawick and others – at Palo Alto in the US, who introduced ideas from cybernetics and general systems theory into social psychology and psychotherapy, focusing in particular on the role of communication. This approach eschewed the traditional focus on individual psychology and historical factors – that involve so-called linear causation and content – and emphasized instead feedback and homeostatic mechanisms and “rules” in here-and-now interactions – so-called circular causation and process – that were thought to maintain or exacerbate problems, whatever the original cause(s).

Relational psychoanalysis began in the 1980s as an attempt to integrate interpersonal psychoanalysis's emphasis on the detailed exploration of interpersonal interactions with British object relations theory's sophisticated ideas about the psychological importance of internalized relationships with other people. Relationalists argue that personality emerges from the matrix of early formative relationships with parents and other figures. Philosophically, relational psychoanalysis is closely allied with social constructionism.