A rainbow is more than the sum of its colours

Organicism, a philosophical position captured in Pepper’s classification of worldviews, has been applied to many fields, including human development. This chapter outlines background ideas in Ancient Greek philosophy and from the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Gestalt psychology of Koffka and Kohler, holism, functionalism, and the Gibsons’ work on perception. The theorizing of Hall on adolescence, Werner’s orthogenetic principle, Gesell’s research on stages of development, and Havighurst’s notion of developmental tasks were all in the organismic tradition. Finally, some 21st-century theorizing that draws on the Gibsons’ work is discussed, and an ongoing move towards systems theorizing is noted.