Genetic Theory of Systemics: How Systemic Models Emerge Through Structural Isomorphism

Systemic therapy has a multitude of models, forms of intervention and figures of thought, but hardly any explicit theory of how such models come into being. This white paper proposes the Genetic Theory of Systemics (German: Systemische Modellentstehung), a meta-theory that describes not the contents of systemic models but their mechanism of emergence: the deliberate recognition of structural isomorphisms between a foreign source domain (craft, physics, innovation methodology, play, mathematics) and the therapeutic field, the transfer of the relational scaffold, and the subsequent test of whether the transfer holds clinically. The name draws on Piaget's genetic epistemology. Drawing on Bertalanffy, Bateson, Gentner's structure-mapping theory and Systematic Inventive Thinking, the paper proposes a five-stage cycle of emergence and four criteria that distinguish a model from a metaphor. Six model emergences from the author's own practice are reconstructed as evidence. The paper includes a position on third-order cybernetics in response to von Foerster's objection. Theoretical paper; no empirical data. English translation and German original.