Family Constellations: Foundations, Practice, Core Concepts, Applications, and Current Research

This scholarly narrative overview offers a single reference source on family constellations, a family-focused form of systemic constellation work. It provides a citable working definition of the method, traces its history from Bert Hellinger and earlier systemic traditions (psychodrama, family sculpture, contextual therapy), describes a typical procedure in nine stages, classifies practice formats (group, individual, organisational, structural, online and virtual reality), and defines eleven core concepts with their status in the wider psychological literature. It gives particular attention to representative experience and its possible explanations. The empirical literature is summarised from the Heidelberg randomised trial (2013) to a 2024 randomised trial, a 2024 virtual-reality trial protocol, the 2021 systematic reviews and a 2026 systematic review preprint. The article sets out professional and ethical standards for facilitation, proposes a research agenda, and outlines a conceptual link between constellation work and the Internal Autobiographical Map (IAM) framework as a hypothesis for future testing.