What/who is the family system?

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Abstract
Systems thinking has generally focused on context and eschewed discussion of personal dynamics as reductionistic. In reality, a system evolves through the social psychological processes occurring reciprocally in person-context interactions. Holistic epistemology of systems must neither reify the system nor obscure the dynamics of the members. The sometimes diverging perspectives of the psychodynamic/ growth and structural/strategic approaches actually converge in the realization that personal experiencing and social structure are not dichotomous phenomena but are related through the circularity of systemic functioning. Understanding the gestalt of a family as persons-dynamicallyinterdependent-in-context shows that persons-in-context both create and are structured by a system.

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