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McDougall, the foremost Purposivist, maintains that the driving forces for consciousness are innate urges or tendencies, chief of which are the submissive and self-assertive tendencies. This purposivism is exercised in goal-seeking. The psychological term for it is conation or striving.
McDougall, the foremost Purposivist, maintains that the driving forces for consciousness are innate urges or tendencies, chief of which are the submissive and self-assertive tendencies. This purposivism is exercised in goal-seeking. The psychological term for it is conation or striving.
Anticipating a little the course of history, I shall here assume that the purposive nature of human action is no longer in dispute, and in this article shall endeavour to define and to justify that special form of purposive psychology which is now pretty widely known as hormic psychology.
Opposing behaviourism, McDougall argued that behaviour was generally goal-oriented and purposive, an approach he called hormic psychology. The term “hormic” comes from hormḗ (ὁρμή), the Greek word for "impulse" and according to Hilgard (1987) was drawn from the work of T. P. Nunn, a British colleague (Larson, 2014).
Purposivism means the primacy of striving or seeking, rather than the primacy of foresight. Sometimes the broader word, horme (hor-may, a Greek word meaning urge), is substituted for purpose, and purposivism rechristened the hormic psychology.
William McDougall (1871–1938) was one of the giants of early psychology, yet his legacy has gone largely unheralded, and his name is seldom recalled outside students of the history of psychology. His brand of psychology, termed “hormic” psychology, serves as one of the foundational frameworks for understanding the wide range of human ...
William McDougall, Purposive Striving as a Fundamental Category of Psychology, The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Sep., 1924), pp. 305-312.
