A Brief History of Systems Approaches in Counseling and Psychotherapy

In this text on clinical epistemology, the authors argue that clinicians were ready to embrace the systems perspective to which the interactional theoretical orientation of non-Freudians had led them. It shows an evolutionary side to the issue, removing discontinuity between these perspectives.

Clinical epistemology has been a very prominent topic with the emergence of systems theory as a widely studied approach to understanding human behavior. With systemic perspectives have come therapy approaches which promise more immediate change than the dynamic therapies begun by the writings and clinical practice of Sigmund Freud. Some view systems and psychodynamic perspectives paradigms as exclusive of one another and even competitive. In this concise book on the topic, Bauserman and Rule express that clinicians were in fact ready to embrace and assimilate the systems perspective because the interactional theoretical orientation of the non-Freudians and other pioneers had led them precisely in that direction. The authors show an evolutionary side to the issue and work to remove some of the discontinuity and acrimony between these two useful perspectives.