ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Ganzheitspsychologie by outlining its background, its main tenets, its methodology, and contrasting it with the parallel movement of the Berlin Gestalt psychology, of which arguably readers are more familiar. It revives Ganzheitspsychologie on its most famous experimental case: Aktualgenese (Microgenesis). Ganzheitspsychologie roughly translates into holistic psychology, but we retain the original term to indicate its link with the theoretical perspectives of the second Leipzig School of Psychology. At the core of the Ganzheits-perspective stands the idea that the whole has a genetic and functional primacy towards its parts; therefore, within every living organism lies the "seed" of the whole, without which its elements are meaningless or artificial. The paradigm of Ganzheitspsychologie includes all research programs whose units of measurement lie within irreducible totalities. Ganzheitspsychologists prefer to define the whole through the lack of obvious parts, that is, through the non-reducibility of the whole.
