[Systems approach to adolescence. Refresher course of the Swiss Psychiatric Society, Zurich, May 1983].

The author summarizes contributions of General Systems Theory to the understanding of adolescence. GST, a metatheory that does not replace intermediary theories which are directly comparable to experience, has firstly attempted to describe hierarchical organizations. More recently, new models have focused on processes. One of these models, the evolutive paradigm, has specified essential conditions of interaction between environment and evolutive systems, called constancy and adjustment. It is applied here to data of a crisis within a non-clinical family with adolescents.