Immanent vitality: Reflections on the actualizing tendency

Abstract

The actualizing tendency is a biopsychosocial construct rooted in the notion of the organism. An indispensable tenet of person-centered therapy, it straddles the natural sciences and the humanities, and can legitimately claim a place among contemporary multimodal scientific investigations, heirs to theories of nature that consistently refuted Darwinian and post-Darwinian evolutionary hypotheses. As a functional, verifiable notion, the actualizing tendency differs from the universalizing notion of the formative tendency. Different from the more confined notion of actualization of the self, it decenters the ego and points toward immanent vitality, a notion divorced from the totalizing claims of both scientism and mysticism and restored to its organismic/phenomenological roots.

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