The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man

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.

A new edition of the English translation was published in 1995: The Organism : A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man, with a foreword by Oliver Sacks, New York, Zone Books. After the rise of Hitler, Goldstein escaped to Amsterdam, supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, where he dictated his work, which would become his magnum opus, in just six weeks. Goldstein described the work being written while in a "time of enforced leisure" in the Netherlands during his flight from Nazi Germany, it was published with only minor revisions in English translation in 1939.

Goldstein's work helped institute the field of phenomenological psychiatry. In The Organism, Goldstein declared that human life cannot be compared to a system which simply returns to a state of balance after stimulation from outside. Goldstein, after critiquing different attempts to classify the instincts, writes that all instinctual manifestations emerge from "the drive to self-actualization." At any moment the organism has the fundamental tendency to actualize all its capacities, its whole potential, as it is present in exactly that moment, and in exactly that situation in contact with the world under the given circumstances. In fact, the term "self-actualization" was originally introduced by Kurt Goldstein as a biological concept to indicate the tendency of the organism's innate motivation to actualize as much as possible which was subsequently extended. Goldstein also referred to the same drive as an "actualizing tendency" and a "formative tendency."

In The Organism Goldstein's main concern was to apply the figure-ground principle of gestalt psychology from perception to the whole organism, presuming that the whole organism serves as the ground for the individual stimulus forming the figure - thus formulating an early criticism of the simple behavioristic stimulus-response-theory.

Goldstein pointed out the experience of individuals with lesioned brains makes it obvious that our neurological and neuropsychological functioning is socially intertwined with that of other brains. Goldstein described preferred behavior (in contrast to non-preferred behavior) as the realization of a reduced subset of all possible performances available to oneself (whether in motility, perception, posture, etc.) that are characterized by a feeling of comfort and correctness.