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The optics of complexity nowadays can be considered as one of the more mature and articulated developments of system thinking and has greatly contributed to renew and enrich the same epistemological basis. Coming from transversal elaborations in various fields of scientific knowledge, the "paradigms of complexity" (Morin 1977) exerted a major influence on theoretical and methodological elaboration of many disciplines of contemporary science, promoting the overcoming of reductionism residues of the mechanistic classical tradition.In systemic psychotherapy, along with other influences, the perspective of complexity has activated in the past 30 years a process of review and conceptual enrichment which seems to invest the entire field of psychotherapy.This healthy trend to renewal is, in general, not only linked to the large increase in demand for psychotherapy, with the extensive range of answers that it requires, but also to a fertile resumption of epistemological reflection in psychotherapy to be intended mainly as a "reflexive" operation that researches the links and correlations between therapeutic practices and theories that inspire them.Specifically with regard to systemic therapy, there is no doubt that the encounter with the evolutionary and constructivist paradigms on one hand and, on the other hand with the perspective of complexity, has led to a healthy questioning of some conceptual assumptions.The purpose of this chapter is precisely to try to define the essential outlines of this critical review of systems theories which are no longer definable in a univocal way and at the same time it tries to point out the inevitable influences that this renewal of theories exerted on therapeutic practices.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39061-1_2

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