In his book The Laws of Human Nature Raymond Wheeler provides a comprehensive and coherent view of the long forgotten idea of configurational fields. I know of no substitute for this book, its principles just as instructive and enlightening in the early 21^st century as they were in the early 20^th century.

It was on the so-called "mind-body" problem that Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Eric Berne foundered. Freud divided "mind" into three "mental organs," Ego, Id, and Superego; Jung into Self, Persona, and Archetype; Berne into Exteropsyche, Archeopsyche, and Neopsyche. These "mental organs" made their mythical "presence" somehow intermingled with the physical organs, such as the brain, heart, lungs, and stomach. Once launched, each of these mythical organs acquired numerous functions, just as the heart pumps blood, the lungs inhale air, and the stomach ingests food.

For system-field investigators the "mind-body problem" never was a problem, since they regarded "mind" neither more nor less than the motor and sensory function of the nervous system. (See especially The Laws of Human Nature by Raymond Wheeler, the predominant American systemic field researcher). None of the gestalt psychologists--Gelb, Hornbostle, Hartmann, Katz, Koffka, Köhler, Lewin, Wertheimer, Wheeler--regarded the relationship between mind and body as a problem, since all of them used the word 'mind' as a verb instead of a noun. Thus we do mind but we do not have a mind. However, best that the word 'mind' be abandoned altogether and replaced with the word 'nerves', and, of course, with the prefix 'neuro-'. So instead of saying 'mental' one ought to say 'neural.' The same might be said of the word 'psych' which is the Greek word for English 'breath'. There are 56 words prefixed by 'psych' all but one of which can accept the substitution, these one being 'psych-o-neurotic'. By replacing the prefix 'psych' with 'neur' the word becomes 'neur-o-neurotic', hence nonsense, and as such unusable. The other words that do not suffer from the abandonment of the word 'psych' are 'neur-o-path', 'neur-o-pathologist' , and 'neur-o-pathology'.

Unfortunately, organismic field theory, which appeared and flourished during the first third of the 20^th century in Europe and America, was largely forgotten by all but a few social scientists in the last two thirds of the 20^th century. At the beginning of the 21^st century most behavioral scientists--anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, sociologists--seem to be unaware of configurational fields, each in his or her own way negotiating the view of life that opposes it, namely mechanistic element theory.

--Taken from the End Notes of David Keirsey's very last book, Personology, Prometheus Nemesis Book Company; 2010.