Biology, based on physics and chemistry, is the core of the knowledge that humans need indispensably for organizing better their survival, because it is necessarily the basis for the evolvement of behavioral sciences which are essential for the evolvement of social sciences.
Through the application of organismic-systems biology to human behavior LvB conceived and developed the organismic-systems psychology, as the theoretical prospect needed for the gradual comprehension of the various ways human personalities may evolve and how could they evolve properly, being supported by a holistic interpretation of human behavior.
Every human individual is an open system with uniquely human qualities; then every human individual should be treated and respected as a whole dynamic entity and should not be considered and used as an object or as a fragment of a whole person. Humans should not see each other as embodiments of one or several human traits, but instead as complex and ever changing systems that may achieve a revolution of harmony.
"What is badly needed is a timely image of man. Since the previous proud image derived from religion and philosophy does not serve modern needs efficiently, a new image should be synthesized... I would contend that this is a very important business indeed--to find out what actually is human."
Learning to see the individual human being as a whole dynamic entity rather than as an assortment of parts, processes and traits leads towards finding out how to tackle those societal problems caused by the fact that many people are nowadays product of a modern Zeitgeist of machine idolatry reinforced every day by mechanistic interpretations of their biological features and their social prospects.
Humans perceive patterns "Gestalten" rather than sums of sensations; then human behavior should not be dissected into different and non-related responses. Human personality is more than the sum of its parts. The values that should help every human to develop his/her individuality ought to be derived from the proper comprehension of the nature of life, which would lead every one of us "...to treat life with reverence, (then) we will tend to treat each other with respect"
The basic question about the mind-body problem is the riddle of the mind interacting with the body. The "self" is not separate from the external world and the cosmos in every personality, as they are a continuum. When mind and body are treated separately they are distorted conceptually till they become linguistic fictions. Psychology and biology are really two aspects of only one discipline, so are psychiatry and medicine. To continue handling the mind-body dualism reinforce the myth that maintains the presence of behaviorism, which is unacceptable because the organism is not a passive automaton reacting to stimuli, it is indeed an autonomous active system. The human being seen as a mind-body unity would lead towards a holistic medicine. But, what prevails is an increasing medical specialization, which is accelerating the dehumanization of medicine. Medical specialists being trained by means of reductionist views accept easily to be mechanistically inclined. The holistic approach should be adopted at once by the medical profession. Every patient should be diagnosed and treated as a psychophysical whole. The unitary concept of mental illness propounds that mental disorder is a systemic disease rather than a number of separate diseases. Disturbed individuals should be helped to restore the "vital balance". Every human being exhibits "equi-final self-preservation" which makes possible to emphasize the body's natural healing powers of any patient who ought to use his/her inner directed ability to protect or restore his/her respective wholeness.
The Bertalanffian organismic-systems psychology was the basis for his "new image of man", which embodies individual responsibility and individual worth. This image was developed to combat the fallacy shared by robotomorphism and zoomorphism: the principle of reactivity according to which all behavior is strictly utilitarian, consisting of the gratification of needs or relaxation of tensions. LvB faulted Freud for "reducing human behavior to animal 'drives', 'instincts', or [biological] 'tissue needs'--essentially sex, hunger, and aggression", though he lauded Freud's psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious, which sounds unmechanistic. Neither Homo sapiens is a conditioned-response kind of robot nor is an incorrigible mere ape. A self-image portraying the human as just another animal would tend to make us indifferent to social inequalities and to make us fatalistic about the recurrence of war. An image depicting the human being as merely a physico-chemical machine would encourage people in all walks of life to treat their fellow human being as an assembly-line object to be manipulated rather than as a unique individual. "The image of man is not only a theoretical question,... it is a question of the preservation of man as human".
