Melodies, systems, and contexts: Challenges for infant mental health

✍ Scribed by Hiram E. Fitzgerald

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 453 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0163-9641
• DOI: 10.1002/1097-0355(199521)16:1<34::aid-imhj2280160107>3.0.co;2-7

✦ Synopsis

Psychoanalytic theory is changing (Emde, 1994). Moreover, there is growing evidence to indicate that systems theory is one of the major forces influencing its transformation (Emde, 1981(Emde, , 1987)). Systems theory emerged as an alternative to mechanistic, reductionist, nomothetic, linear causal models which characterized classical science in the early 20th-century physics (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Sameroff, 1983; von Bertalanffy, 1933). Emde (1981) has discussed "systems sensitivity," which in psychoanalytic theory refers to ". . . an intuitive, empathic registration by the therapist of the quality of functioning of complex personality subsystems and their interactions" (pp. 5-6). Kagan, Kearsley, and Zelazo (1978) capture the essence of nonreductionism associated with systems approaches in their observation that