[Psychiatric emergencies and systems thinking]

According to the "ecosystemic" model, the author proposes to substitute for the traditional view of the psychiatric emergency the concept of crisis state and process in the relational field of the identified patient. He describes the different steps of a family crisis intervention, showing how a psychiatric clinic can function as a center of crisis intervention; than he underlines how the systemic model allows to get an optimal coordination of the institutional context and to handle some "emergencies" arising in the clinic.