Andras Angyal

Who was Andras Angyal?

Andras Angyal was an American psychiatrist, known for a holistic model for a theory of personality.

His 1941 work on "The Structure of Wholes" and "Systems and Gestalt" was seen as a precedent to systems theory in readers in the 1960s-1980s edited by Fred Emery. Angyal's biospheric model of personality was found to greater generality beyond the domain of personality, to a broader range of systems.

Angyal ... coined the word biosphere. The word refers to both the individual and the environment, "not as interacting parts, not as constituents which have independent existence, but as aspects of a single reality which can be separated only by abstraction". [....]

The biosphere is seen as a system of interlocking systems so arranged that any given sub-system of the biosphere is both the container of lesser systems and the contained of a greater system or systems. The interplay of the interlocking systems creates a tension which gives rise to the energy, which is available to the personality. Moreover, the biosphere as a whole is characterized by a fundamental polarity which gives rise to its most fundamental energy.