| Summary: | "The present volume offers to students an exposition of organismic or interactional psychology. In this book it has been my aim to lay before the college student or general reader the materials of psychology not as firmly settled facts and principles but as problems to be faced and worked over. It may be well to state some of the assumptions of the organismic viewpoint. One of the first is that psychology has its own subject-matter and is not a patchwork of physiology and philosophy as so many writers seem to believe. Organismic psychology holds that psychological phenomena are very specific interactions between organisms and stimulating objects. The interaction view, it is submitted, allows the student to look upon psychological phenomena as objective, natural happenings. On the other hand, the psychologist is relieved from the necessity of reducing his data to actual or hypothetical, neural or general biological events--or worse still, inventing physiological facts to explain psychological phenomena. To do either results in a serious misinterpretation of psychological data. Psychological phenomena are, of course, always at the same time biological phenomena. In other words, physiological activities always participate in psychological happenings. It is an advantage of the organismic viewpoint that it can treat the biological facts implicated in psychological phenomena in an unbiased manner. And so the reader will find a number of chapters devoted to man as a biological organism. Another assumption: It is no longer necessary in order to make psychology scientific to restrict our descriptions to comparatively simple activities (reflexes or habits) as the objective psychologist has been doing. We may then quite properly discuss such behavior as imagery and voluntary action. Furthermore, we may take account of the social and cultural influences upon our mentality. This we do in the concluding chapters devoted to the psychological individual as an anthropological being. Wherever possible I have attempted to indicate the experimental treatment of the various topics. The laboratory studies described in this book are not intended to mislead the student into thinking that all or even a large part of psychological phenomena have been subjected to experimental handling, but rather to give him an idea concerning laboratory work in psychology"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).
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