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nme Chapter 22: Systems, Counselling and Psychotherapy 1,1 Counselling end psychotherapy as social organisatioual activities in psychology it occasionally happens that a particular perspective, or way of organising events, comes into vogue and finds application across a wide variety of specialised areas of psychology. Learning theory is an obvious example of this. Researchers in 2 variety of areas claim learning theory aa the theoreticel framework upon which they have ordered their findings without regard for the evident fact that there is no coherent, onified set of principles which could unequivocally be identified as "lesoning theory". As Weitzman (1967) argued in his analysis of “learning theoxy” (ue it wag then being related to behaviour therapy und peychotherapy}: ‘that which is said to ve “learning theory” amounts to little more than a faw explanatory principles weakly related to each other. Nonetheless, there seema to ve an almost irresistible appeal for systematisers in psychology to align themselves with particular "perspectives” (after Price, 1972, pp 7-19) imposing a pre- established harmony on the data which they are “seeking” to organise. The most recent perspective to come into widespread use in psycholegy ie that of “systems theory", Areas in which systems theory has recently found application include: psychotherapy (Howard and Orlinsky, 19723 Moos a Macintesh, 1970); psychopathology (Gray, von Bertalanffy, Rizzo and Duhl, 19693 Wertheim, (1972); organisational psychology (Ackoff and tmery, 19723 katz and Xshn, 1966); family processes and family therapy {Coles and Alexander, 19712 Jackeon, 1967}; homan communication (Watazlawick, Beavin and Jackson, 1967). The devaiopment of systems theory in ita present form is generally attributed to the work of von Bertalanffy (19508), It was subsequently applied to engineering and commercial planning (Hall, 1962) and to physics and piology (von Bertalanffy, 1950bg Weise, 1969}, Within these areas it haa a reasonably well defined character and mode of application, Wedies (1969) defines a ayatem Ags “ine @ Father clircunseribed complex of velatively bounded phencemena, which, within those bounds, retains a relatively stationary pattern of structure in space or of sequential configuration in time In apite of s high degree of variatility in the detaile 
