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Epistemological comparison reveals congruence between the reality-defusing though rules of new science, Batesonian evolution, and ecosystemic thinking with families and family therapy. These rules provide a base for a technology of therapy in which the therapist functions as a benign detective, seeking out with the family and others the event-shape in time-space (the Storey) that contains the reported distress. Intervention consists of action that adds to the Storey in a manner designed to alleviate the distress. A Storey is presented that illustrates the difference between medical, paradoxical, and ecosystemic interventions.

The current shift of interest, reflected in public policy, from the production of goods to the provision of services, has caused a major re-examination of the nature of the services the individual can expect from his society. This re-examination is producing a number of insights, some of them shocking. In particular, we are learning that many of the systems we have created to deliver services are, in the name of “progress” and “civilization,” contributing to the conditions of human distress they were designed to alleviate. Much has been written lately about how service systems of one kind or another subvert their announced goals—how a welfare system perpetuates poverty, or how the medical profession creates iatrogenic illness. There has not been very much written, however, about how several systems inadvertently combine in their day to day operations in such a way as to frustrate each others' activities, and how, in so doing, they destroy in varying degrees the lives of people, or render it difficult for them to improve their lives. We have all been much too tightly locked in our own niches by training, experience, and various types of private interest to see this kind of interlock. It comes into sharp perspective only when one studies the problems of a single person in terms of his total life space, his “ecology.” This paper represents an effort to describe one such situation in a family as viewed from a community health services program designed to approach human crises as ecological phenomena, and to explore and respond to them within this framework. We have found that the best way to organize our view of the environmental field people move in is according to the diverse systems which make it up, so we have labeled our theoretical base “ecological systems theory.” (1) What is of particular interest to the behavioral scientist in the situation described is that neither individual nor family diagnosis, nor the contributions of the larger systems (in this case a housing system and a system of medical care) will, if viewed separately, explain the state of the man in question. Only when the contributions of all of these systems are made clear, and their interrelationships explored, do the origins of the phenomena described begin to emerge.

Piaget's demonstration interview technique was used to test the level of development of the thinking capacities of socially dissonant children in a disadvantaged area. His theory of groups and groupings were taken as a frame of reference in interpreting the results, which showed a severe developmental lag in these children. The findings are discussed in terms of effects of cognitive patterns on social adaptation in urban areas.

There are hundreds of children who present a combination of childish dependency and negativistic bravado. They are full of resourcefulness and cunning about how to get along in the streets, yet they are hopelessly ignorant and illiterate after six grades of public school. They demand constant gratification but do not admit being gratified. This chapter is confined to two areas, namely, what the authors have observed about how the families function, and the adaptations of therapeutic technique they have devised for clinical work with them. The author's first job was to design an approach that would tap the operations of the subgroups in the family and help in understanding their separate dynamics and create conditions within which the critical split between parents and siblings could be mended by bringing the sibling operation into the sphere of parental awareness. The ultimate goal was the re-establishment of the parental control and guidance children need for their growth.