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# Schwartz and Sweezy, “Individuals as Systems” (2020)
- URL: https://www.chudgar.com/schwartz-and-sweezy-individuals-as-systems-2020/
- Published: 2024-06-10T21:47:37.000Z
- Updated: 2025-03-18T20:04:10.000Z
- Description: The second chapter from the second edition of Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy’s Internal Family Systems textbook, which gives an overview of the fundamental principles of the IFS model.
- Author: Ash Chudgar
- Tags: Resources, Partswork, Longreads

## This is how the chapter begins:

> Early in the 20th century a group of organismic biologists recognized that studying the chemical and physical laws of a living organism’s components was limiting their understanding of how those components coordinated to function as a whole. Their explorations gave birth to a new way of conceptualizing and studying living organisms, which came to be called “systems thinking.” Rather than analyzing an organism’s components—which is now called *reductionistic*, *mechanistic*, or *atomistic thinking*—systems thinking is wholistic, organismic, or ecological. Rather than asking “What is this made of?”, systems thinkers ask, “How do the components of this function as a pattern?” and “What is the larger context in which it operates, and how is it affected by that context?” Rather than studying each part individually, they map relationships among a system’s parts and with its context.   
>  
> From those early explorations in biology, systems thinking produced a radically new conception of life.

Click below to download the chapter in PDF form with my pencil annotations from 2021, or scroll down to read it on this page.

[Schwartz and Sweezy, "Individuals as Systems" (2020)Schwartz and Sweezy, "Individuals as Systems" (2020).pdf8 MBdownload-circle](https://www.chudgar.com/content/files/2024/06/Schwartz-and-Sweezy---22Individuals-as-Systems-22--2020-.pdf "Download")

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