System’s Psychopathology

Abstract

Most System’s approaches to Psychopathology have been centered in methods leading to nosological delimitation and classification, or else in the specification of choice of observable data or still on theoretical constructs which finally serve these same purposes. In our view, the fact that those classifications are based on “clinical indicators” of heterogeneous origin, is not generally recognized. Even the references to System’s Theory using surface metephors may paradoxically obliterate the evolution that the contribution the System’s Theory may bring to Psychopathology. Using more rigorous methods by means of which data would be acquired in well controlled environmental, and expecially social interactions, would provide some help to guide us in the epistemic muddle of clinical diagnostic classifications, provide some needed cross-validation to purely clinically oriented systems and more important than that, help us in finding ways of explaining psychopathological phenomena in a relational-analytic manner. The Psychology Group of the Fac. of Medicine made during the last nine years some experiments on interpersonal relationships which involved the free behaviour of a single person with a restrict group of subjects which reacted towards within strictly ritualized form.