Systems Approach - Essay Example

Systems Approach 2005 The System Approach presupposes that any living organism can’t exist separately from its surroundings, because ‘organisms are open systems: they cannot survive without continuously exchanging matter and energy with their surroundings’ [Kelly, G., p.168]. Open systems are said to interact with other systems outside of themselves, when this interaction has two ‘components: input, that what enters the system from outside, and output, that what leaves the system for the environment’.

[Kelly, G., p.169]. The System Approach integrates both holism and reductionism. [Kelly, G., p.204]. According to this, the laws governing the parts determine or cause the behavior of the whole. That’s why the client’s behavior needs to be viewed as a whole, being determined by the complex of influences from inner and outer surroundings to the organism. General Systems Theory is based on the assumption that there are universal principles of organization, which hold all the systems, be they physical, chemical, biological, mental or social.

In this case, while treating a client there is an urgent need to appreciate his behavior as being influenced by a complicated list of determinates, which could be very different, but at the same time, due to the Systems Approach, are similar to all the human organisms. According to G.A.Kelly, the person-as-clent is ‘what he does’, and the therapist is primary interested in the client’s overall personal construction system within which he structures his world, and builds his relations to such a world.

Primary diagnostic work in this case include an outline of the client’s existing channels of movement, the prediction of the development of a way how a person will behave, and what factors this behavior is determined by. The reasons for this emerge from the client’s inner problems, hidden in his childhood (this is the case of study for psychoanalysis, when the behavioral patterns of a client are the shadows of the events happened to him in the past), or are determined by the conditions of the present surrounding, and his personal behavioral constructs.

Kelly stresses, that ‘by seeing a client’s constructs and their opposites as channels of potential movement for him, the therapist has some basis for forecasting what adjustments will appear to the client to be available when he finds himself up to his ears in people’. [Kelly, G., p.187] To view a client and to make an appropriate diagnosis the therapist must point of all the influences which have a certain impact on the client’s behavior, because a person with psychological difficulties in relevance to this can be seen as ‘one whose theories of the world have become relatively obsolete’ [Kelly, G., p.192], and therapy here is designed to give a new freedom of movement and new control to a person.

The scientist can also alter the client’s world views by reconstructing the past with a variety of theories and thereby increase his personal control of the future. Kelly says that ‘person is not a victim of his biography but that he may be enslaved by his interpretation of it’. [Kelly, G., p.231]The therapist role is to guide a client in the events, and get him moving. By understanding the client’s world view and his behavior in correspondence to this, the therapist task is to clear out the client’s disorders and events’ wrong interpretation and help him to find out the way to keep on moving, to organize his behavior to be adequate to the situation.

According to Kelly and his personal constructs, there are eight levels of personal change which can be summarized within three categories. First of all, there are techniques when a person reconstructs himself and his world within the original system. Secondly, by increasing internal consistency, the system can be organized more precisely. Thirdly, new constructs can be created to replace others now abandoned by the system. [Kelly, G., p.208]But nevertheless, the therapist pre-task is to overview the reasons of client’s behavior in frames of the systems approach, when using, for instance, Freudian approaches towards looking for the past to clarify the person’s important constructs, and to generate a range of elements with the help of which the client may create new behavioral patterns.

The reasons of personal behavior may be governed by both past events and past traumatic situations, present important conditions which contribute to his personal system of values and views, and his threats according the future events. Thus, the therapist is to study all these aspects to work out the more sufficient for a particular client ways of movement and self-improvement to help his to get rid of the psychological difficulties he has got, and become adequate to the present reality. References1. Kelly, G.A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs.

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