Making Meaning

Bert Hellinger first named constellation work, Family Constellations. As the application of the work widened into business, politics, environment, community, the work has is becoming more widely known as Systemic Constellations (note the name of the international organization, ISCA: International Systemic Constellation Association. This name reveals the foundation on which Systemic Constellations rests.  Systems theory is many layered and complex, but maybe a bit of simplification can be achieved by looking at its beginnings and taking out the elements that serve as the foundation of this work.

 

We make sense of our world and give meaning to it in a commonsense way, by perceiving it and processing that information through our senses. We label and categorise, compare, make assumptions. But underlying this seemingly simple way of processing and making meaning, are philosophical and scientific frameworks which have become part of our historical, scientific and cultural heritage.  We make sense of the world and give meaning to our lived lives by looking at the world through the current ‘window’ that reveals our reality.

 

The framework that was current for many years, and still underlies much of the way science is practiced, is a mechanistic view of the world, that of Newtonian (classical) physics. It was and is a powerful commonsense view that showed clear linear cause and effect processes that could be seen and studied. It answered many questions about how we and the world functioned.

 

Together with this causal world view went Cartesian dualism, which described a division between mind and body. This view of the natural world was carried over to the psychological ‘sciences’, where the split between mind and body underlay the view of human being as a mix of chemical and physical processes (Heisenberg, 1990).

In the early 1930s the sub-atomic, small world of atoms and particles was uncovered, but it did not fit into this 16th century mechanistic paradigm; this smaller world seemed not to behave in the expected way. The old mechanistic, deterministic view could no longer answer questions about this new world of chaotic unpredictability.

 

Many of the current theories of that time focussed on the individual who was seen as being determined by sets of different causes that resulted in certain behaviours. In the 1940s and 1950s (this can be traced in the history of the diciplline of anthropology) there was a shift from a Freudian emphasis on the individual to that of the individual within a broader context - that of family and as part of the wider community. This re-framing allowed new insights and a another way of understanding  ourselves and how we are in the world.