Tretter F, Loeffler-Stastka H. How does the ‘environment’ come to the person? The ‘ecology of the person’ and addiction . World J Psychiatr 2021; 11(11): 915-936 [PMID: 34888165 DOI: 10.5498/wjp.v11.i11.915]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Henriette Loeffler-Stastka, MD, Dean, Professor, Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Medical University Vienna, Währinger Gürtel 18-20, Vienna 1090, Austria. henriette.loeffler-stastka@meduniwien.ac.at
Research Domain of This Article
Psychiatry
Article-Type of This Article
Field of Vision
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Psychiatr. Nov 19, 2021; 11(11): 915-936 Published online Nov 19, 2021. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v11.i11.915
How does the ‘environment’ come to the person? The ‘ecology of the person’ and addiction
Felix Tretter, Henriette Loeffler-Stastka
Felix Tretter, Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna 1040, Austria
Henriette Loeffler-Stastka, Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Medical University Vienna, Vienna 1090, Austria
Author contributions: Tretter F and Loeffler-Stastka H conceived the topic in iterative discussions; Loeffler-Stastka H contributed the question how comes “the social into the mind” and added the psychoanalytic concepts; Tretter F provided expertise for systems theory, concepts on addiction, and the ecology of the person.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interest regarding our manuscript.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Henriette Loeffler-Stastka, MD, Dean, Professor, Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Medical University Vienna, Währinger Gürtel 18-20, Vienna 1090, Austria. henriette.loeffler-stastka@meduniwien.ac.at
Received: May 1, 2021 Peer-review started: May 1, 2021 First decision: June 17, 2021 Revised: June 30, 2021 Accepted: September 2, 2021 Article in press: September 2, 2021 Published online: November 19, 2021
Core Tip
Core Tip: Similar to theoretical medicine, theoretical psychiatry and its engagement with systems/network psychopathology has a research gap, and so we shed light on the question of how the “social”, respectively the environment, manifests itself in the person. Using addiction as an example, we explore systems theoretical and psychoanalytic concepts to provide a framework for understanding the sociocultural, interpersonal, and human ecological factors that impact mental health and illness. This theoretical framework provides a way to understand conceptually and structure computer-collected Big Data. The fact that humans are “situated subjects” implies a broader view of a systemic ecology of the person to guide processes of change in mental health, whether for prevention or treatment.
