How processes of family functioning are conceptualized influences a therapist's understanding and use of immediate experiential phenomena in the therapy setting. This article outlines two basic formulations that generate different conceptual perspectives of immediate phenomena. One recognizes that the family system has a time‐enduring stability, while the second postulates that the family system has an immediate and temporary organization. The latter position is developed as an appropriate and useful application of systems thinking. Integrating systems thinking and Gestalt Therapy provides a framework for this application, one that recognizes individual experience as organized and as embedded in a mutual causal, self‐maintaining system of the whole. The nature of such wholes, how they maintain their stability, their potential for change, and implications for therapy are described.

This article describes the traditional model of human psychological functioning which dominates current theorizing, contrasts it with the new, emerging perspective of self-organizing processes, and applies this new approach to a theory of human psychological functioning. In the traditional model there is an assumption that processes of functioning are discretely different from physical structure. This assumption is shown to be intrinsic to a linear conceptual framework which implies that (a) stability of functioning derives from physical structure; (b) functioning is determined by the effects of enduring, antecedent components; (c) the environment can selectively influence structure; and (d) observational methods are capable of accessing and revealing processes of functioning. In the contrasting self-organizational perspective, structure and functioning are assumed to be given in one another at the level of organizational process. This formulation implies that as a system functions (a) its orderliness and stability are being determined by the ongoing functioning itself; (b) at the level or organizational functioning there are no antecedent structures separate from consequent activity; (c) systemic functioning exists as a unitary and continuous organizational process; and (d) organizational functioning cannot be instructed by environmental events. The work of Prigogine and of Maturana are examined as a basis for a theory of human psychological functioning as a self-organizing system. The theory that is proposed describes how attentional and experiential functioning evolve as a system of organizational continuity and coherence and how the process by which people recognize and identify their functioning secures this organizational functioning.

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Gestalt therapy is described as a comprehensive framework of theory and techniques for experiential family threapy. Like other experientially oriented therapies, it is systems-oriented, immediate-experience-oriented, and affect-oriented. Unlike others, this method regards the client system's emergent processes as the central focus, and it emphasizes that growth occurs as the family and its members are helped to greater self-awareness and responsibility for their own functioning.