Great insight into the ways that families function has come to us from the family therapy literature. Coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, family therapy broke away from the discipline of individual therapy to form its own theories and general philosophical outlook. The core idea, influenced by the seminal work of the biologist Ludwig von Bertolanffy, was that families should be looked at as systems and not as a static collection of isolated parts. In other words, families are best understood as a dynamic whole—almost as living organisms—rather than as an unrelated pile of objects.