ABSTRACT
The field of motivation addresses the issue of what determines-induces a person to act or behave in a particular way. A dialectical-constructivist approach to motivation should add to this a causal account of how-why the organism synthesizes performances vis-à-vis situations. This integrative perspective has not always been there. Research in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s often construed motivation as the cognitive-behavioral manifestation of instinctual-innate drives such as hunger, sex, fear, attachment, and other positive or negative affects. Research in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was dominated by an emphasis on social-learning determinants of motivation; and by a growing awareness that human motivation results from complex structural learning processes that synthesize and adapt organismic functional structures to constitute people’s plans-projects for action within situations. Although the current literature on human motivation offers exten-
sive discussions of relevant issues and constructs, it lacks an adequate, explicit, dynamic, and unified organismic theory or framework that can explain the ontogenetic evolution of motivation. By the term organismic we mean compatible with and interpretable into what is now known about brain and biological processes of the human organism. Our aim is to contribute new clear ideas and some tentative unifying models that might be useful to the theory-building enterprise.
