I guess I'll say it was inevitable I'd fall behind but I am determined to catch up well before the "semester" ends. Fortunately, when I was in college reading period was after winter break...
Heinz Werner's organismic-developmental theory seems like something I used to understand and now can't quite piece together. I'm pretty sure it was the school of thought in which Professor Demick was situated, and I seem to remember it holding together in a certain way that I've lost but made a lot of sense at the time.
Two things that interested me in the notes -- First, the idea that we experience reality in three ways. We have an experience of ourselves, an experience of the environment, and an experience of self-within-environment. That's interested as a description of awareness, if that's what they actually meant. I don't remember how that plays out. It's different from saying that a person can be understood from the outside in three ways. The second thing I was struck by was the idea of development as always starting with something new that is diffuse and disorganized, which seems in some sense to be "regression" but is actually the stage anything goes through as it comes into being and then adapts. I think the notes say we are constantly going through this with regard to new things all the time, but overall for most people there is a trend toward organization. This is parr of what's meant by an organismic theory -- people are organisms, and we encounter new things outside and also our capacities pop into play at different stages, and there is a process of accommodating and adapting and then functioning. Those weren't the terms in these notes.
Why I say I used to get it more -- I think what I'm seeing in my notes is a bunch of parts. The idea of the human as an organism -- a whole, whose levels and parts are distinct but all relevant to who the person is; as a part of an environment, and not an isolated entity -- that I got at the time and still get. How this translates into understanding psychological phenomena in a distinct way, either I don't see it or it's obvious and everywhere. The latter might have been the point. You can't just pick one thing about human development and call that the main thing, or even understand the one thing on its own, whether that's social development or cognitive development. Okay, maybe I do still get it?
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