General systems model: principles and general applications

Overview

How one views the world is a complex outcome of both primary and secondary socialization processes. Psychiatric nurses need to know not only how their clients, patients or families view the world, but how they, themselves, see things. It is very useful for nurses, who choose to work with the complicated, multidimensional natures of human personalities, to also know about themselves. In this chapter, the aim is not to provide material about how primary socialization shapes and forms the human personality, but rather to focus on the secondary socialization process — how our education, as professionals, leads us to think in particular ways about how the world works, and how the human personalities within it think, feel and act.

Basic nursing curricula include views of human behaviour and psychosocial functioning selected from the fields of psychology, social psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and sociology. Theories in these fields are relatively new, having emerged only in this century, and they are quite diverse in terms of scope and explanatory foci. Before explicating the manner in which general system theory (von Bertalanffy, 1956; 1968) can serve as a useful theoretical base for psychiatric nurses, a very short history of the available theories in the earlier part of this century will be presented. Then systems concepts will be described and discussed. Specific applications will follow, derived from clinical cases.