Organismic theories in
psychology are a family of
holistic psychological theories which tend to stress the organization, unity, and integration of human beings expressed through each individual's inherent growth or developmental tendency. The idea of an explicitly "organismic theory" dates at least back to the publication of
Kurt Goldstein's
The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man in 1934. Organismic theories and the "organic" metaphor were inspired by
organicist approaches in biology. The most direct influence from inside psychology comes from
gestalt psychology. This approach is often contrasted with
mechanistic and
reductionist perspectives in psychology.