Traditionally, the term holism has been used as a general label for any approach that focuses on the totality (or whole) of a living organism. The basic axiom is that complex phenomena cannot be fully understood by an analysis of their parts alone. For human psychology, this means that the mind is not a mere aggregate of constituent parts but rather that it has an oversummative character and thus must be studied as an integrated unit. The fundamental premise that all holistic schools of psychology follow is that in living nature, the whole is more (or different) than the sum of its parts.

A lot of early German psychology in particular was heavily influenced by this basic premise, with the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology ...

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