Andras Angyal (1902–1960) was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist, known for a holistic model for a theory of personality.
His 1939 work on "The Structure of Wholes" [1] was seen as a precedent to systems theory in books in the 1960s–1980s edited by Fred Emery. [2] Angyal's biospheric model of personality was found to have greater generality beyond the domain of personality, to a broader range of systems.
Angyal ... coined the word biosphere. The word refers to both the individual and the environment, "not as interacting parts, not as constituents which have independent existence, but as aspects of a single reality which can be separated only by abstraction". [...]
The biosphere is seen as a system of interlocking systems so arranged that any given sub-system of the biosphere is both the container of lesser systems and the contained of a greater system or systems. The interplay of the interlocking systems creates a tension which gives rise to the energy, which is available to the personality. Moreover, the biosphere as a whole is characterized by a fundamental polarity which gives rise to its most fundamental energy. This polarity arises from the fact that the environment pulls in one direction and the organism in the other.
To these fundamental yet opposed pulls of the biosphere, Angyal has given the names of autonomy and homonomy, respectively. Autonomy is the relatively egoistic pole of the biosphere: it represents the tendency to advance one's interests by mastering the environment, by asserting oneself, so to speak, as a separate being. Homonomy is the relatively 'selfless' pole of the biosphere: it is the tendency to fit oneself to the environment by willingly subordinating oneself to something that one perceives as larger than the individual self. In place of the words autonomy and homonomy, Angyal has also used the terms self-determination and self-surrender to describe these opposing yet co-operating directional trends of the biosphere, and he has felicitously summed up the individual's relationship to them with the remark that, "the human being comports himself as if he were a whole of an intermediate order". [3]
Angyal was born in rural Transylvania (then Hungary), Angyal received his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1927 and his M.D. from the University of Turin in 1932.
He emigrated to the United States in 1932 and became a Rockefeller Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He moved to Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts as a psychiatrist in the research unit, becoming Director of Research from 1937-1945. From 1945 until his death in 1960 he was in private practice in Boston, MA.
Angyal was known for his holistic view of psychology. The term 'biosphere' appears in his work, which for Angyal denoted a holistic entity/single reality, including both the individual and the environment.
His family name means angel in Hungarian.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an idea in psychology proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the journal Psychological Review. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. The theory is a classification system intended to reflect the universal needs of society as its base, then proceeding to more acquired emotions. The hierarchy of needs is split between deficiency needs and growth needs, with two key themes involved within the theory being individualism and the prioritization of needs. While the theory is usually shown as a pyramid in illustrations, Maslow himself never created a pyramid to represent the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs is a psychological idea and also an assessment tool, particularly in education, healthcare and social work. The hierarchy remains a popular framework, for example in sociology research, management training, and higher education.
Personality is any person's or individual's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive and emotional patterns that biological and environmental factors influence; these interrelated patterns are relatively stable over long time periods, but they change over the entire lifetime. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, most theories focus on motivation and psychological interactions with the environment one is surrounded by. Trait-based personality theories, such as those defined by Raymond Cattell, define personality as traits that predict an individual's behavior. On the other hand, more behaviorally-based approaches define personality through learning and habits. Nevertheless, most theories view personality as relatively stable.
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Integral yoga, sometimes also called supramental yoga, is the yoga-based philosophy and practice of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Central to Integral yoga is the idea that Spirit manifests itself in a process of involution, meanwhile forgetting its origins. The reverse process of evolution is driven toward a complete manifestation of spirit.
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Self-actualization, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is the highest level of psychological development, where personal potential is fully realized after basic bodily and ego needs have been fulfilled.
Conductive Education (CE) is an educational system, based on the work of Hungarian Professor András Pető, that has been specifically developed for children and adults who have motor disorders of neurological origin such as cerebral palsy.
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The biospheric model of personality is a contribution to the psychology of personality proposed by Andras Angyal in 1941. According to this model, the biosphere is the system of the individual and their environment, consisting of Subject subsystem and Object subsystem.
Integral theory is a synthetic metatheory developed by Ken Wilber. It attempts to place a wide diversity of theories and models into one single framework. The basis is a "spectrum of consciousness," from archaic consciousness to ultimate spirit, presented as a developmental model. This model is based on development stages as described in structural developmental stage theories; various psychic and supernatural experiences; and models of spiritual development. In Wilber's later framework, the AQAL model, it is extended with a grid with four quadrants, synthesizing various theories and models of individual psychological and spiritual development, of collective mutations of consciousness, and of levels or holons of neurological functioning and societal organisation, in a metatheory in which all academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience are supposed to fit together.
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The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man is a book on psychology and neurology by Dr. Kurt Goldstein, first published under the title Der Aufbau des Organismus: Einführung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen, in 1934.
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