A Fine Sensibility

EDGAR A. LEVENSON has been having a romance with psychoanalytic concepts and concepts about psychoanalysis for the past twenty years. Like watching Fred Astaire in those old movies, deeply in love with his partners, gliding them across chandeliered dance floors, one gets vicarious pleasure observing Dr. Levenson play with analytic ideas. But in the movies of that other generation, I never thought those partners were adequate to Astaire's perfectionism. Reading Dr. Levenson, I get the same feeling. Perhaps that is his essential appeal. His is a fine sensibility.

The systems concept1 has had a long respectable history. Without the term "system" occurring, the idea appears as "natural philosophy" to Leibniz, and to Nicholas of Cusa; as the "coincidence of opposites" to Paracelsus; to Vico's vision of history as a sequence of "cultural entities, " and to the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Engels. Even Kohler's "physical gestalten" pointed in this direction. And "holism" was a hallmark in the writings of Kurt Goldstein. There are, of course, theory systems and they are not General Systems Theory. Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and others, all have systems with which to construct theoretical history. While the differences among these systems are evident, they all agree that the historical process is not accidental but follows ascertainable laws.

A system is defined as a complex of elements in mutual interaction. It is true systems can be classified as closed or open, and while some authors have stated, or implied, that certain theories of psychology and personality are based on the conception of closed systems, Allport, in contradistinction to what Dr. Levenson writes, was evidently of the opinion that we had better leave closed systems to the realm of physics. And even here, referring to Einstein's theory for the transformation of matter into energy, Allport questioned whether this did not demonstrate the futility of positing a closed system even in phy