The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis: decision, sorting, judgement. In ancient medicine it named the critical point at which the patient tips over, towards death or towards recovery.

Even today we often reduce a crisis to a malfunction to be corrected. In systemic terms it is far more than that: a process of accelerated reorganisation, a signal that the old balance has become untenable.

It does not designate a pathology but an effort by the system not to founder. An effort that is sometimes clumsy, painful, confused, yet also carries novelty.

From the standpoint of complexity, a crisis is a bifurcation. Edgar Morin calls it an uncertain branching. For Simondon it is a phase of individuation, where a system reaches a new coherence. For Deleuze it is a line of flight, breaking frozen forms in order to create others.

In clinical work, Salvador Minuchin and Maurizio Andolfi put it forcefully: a family changes when it can no longer do otherwise. The crisis is that limit-moment, the overflow that forces it to let go of the known.

In the 1960s, Donald Langsley and his team developed the Denver Project, an innovative response to acute psychiatric crises. Rather than hospitalising the patient in isolation, they immediately involved the family in co-constructing the care.

It becomes a potential space for collective transformation, provided the right tools are brought to bear. This vision opened the way to present-day approaches such as Open Dialogue, where the crisis becomes a place of shared speech rather than an incident to be contained.

Systemic practitioners meet different forms of crisis. Here is a synthetic typology, drawn from the findings of the Denver project.

These distinctions are not exclusive. A structural crisis can be triggered by an external shock; a developmental crisis can destabilise a rigid structure.

The transcultural reading of crises, developed by Celia Falicov, enriches this typology. She shows that a crisis neither manifests nor regulates itself in the same way across cultural contexts.

An adolescent crisis in a migrant family is often also an identity and cultural crisis: between the values of the country of origin and those of the host society, the family narrative wavers.

Falicov proposes a narrative-contextual approach, in which the therapist’s task is to reintegrate the critical event into a broader family history, allowing each member to reposition themselves within it.