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18.3: What are Organismic meta-theories?

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    Organismic meta-theories can be understood using the butterfly as a metaphor for development. This metaphor is helpful for illustrating one of the most important assumptions of the organismic perspective, namely, that development progresses through discontinuous qualitatively different steps pr stages (like from the caterpillar, to the chrysalis, to the butterfly). Other writers simply use “the organism” or the “living organized system” as the root metaphor (e.g., Reese & Overton, 1970). This analogue is helpful in emphasizing the interconnectedness of the parts of the system and the impossibility of decomposing them. If, from a Mechanistic perspective, one wishes to understand a carburetor, one can remove it from the car, study it, understand it, and put it back. If, from an Organismic perspective, one tries this with part of an organism, say its heart, one will permanently destroy the object of study, while learning nothing about the heart, because it ceases to have its properties of “heart-ness” (i.e., to function as a heart) once it is removed from the rest of the body.

    From this perspective, as summarized in Table 7.1, the target units of analysis are structured parts-wholes, which are organized in specific ways to serve certain functions. Improvements in these parts or their relationships take place through individuals’ active exchanges with their contexts directed by their own goals and interpreted through their current levels of understanding. People are assumed to be inherently active and to construct their own next steps in development based on the affordances and opportunities provided by the environment. Development is caused by structural dynamics, such as successive differentiation, imbalances, or integrations, that lead to the emergence of new (re)organizations. In general, development is assumed to be progressive (gets better), unidirectional (goes only from caterpillar toward butterfly), and irreversible (butterflies do not turn back into caterpillars). Because these developments are guided largely by internal forces (sometimes referred to as “inherent growth tendencies”), Organismic meta-theories often posit that development follows one set of universal stages, steps, phases, or tasks. The underlying hypothesized causes of development in Organismic meta-theories are active goal-directed exchanges with the environment leading to successive reorganizations of bio-psychological structures over time in the direction of adaptive developmental endpoints.

    The prototypical Organismic theory, and the one that was causing all the trouble documented by Reese and Overton (1970), is Piaget’s constructivist theory of cognitive and affective development, and the many developmental theories that were based on Piaget, for example, Kohlberg’s theory of moral development reasoning. Other Organismic theories include Werner’s comparative psychology as seen in his orthogenetic principle, and Erikson as seen in his universal age-graded developmental tasks. Other theories that claim kinship with Organismic meta-theories (e.g., theories of intrinsic motivation) do not typically include notions of universal stages or tasks, but focus instead on Organismic assumptions about the human nature, specifically, that humans are innately active, curious, and interested, and inherently desire to explore, understand, and fit in with their social and physical environments. With the rise of radical contextualism and cultural relativism in psychology, theories of “universal” anything (e.g., psychological needs, stages, developmental tasks) have come increasingly under attack.