ABSTRACT
The physiomorphic process expresses itself at a number of different levels. Some of these, like tool-use, represent what are initially physiological extensions, a point recognised by McLuhan when he described media as extensions of the nervous system. But these physiological level phenomena necessarily have a psychological dimension, percolating as it were into the very terms in which human understand theirselves. A cycle has become established in which properties are recombined and re-projected in technological forms which, externalized again, then serve as raw material for re-assimilation. And in the return phase of this cycle the discipline of Psychology plays an increasing part. An earlier generation saw the central dilemma of ‘Modern Man’, as it termed us, as located in the conflict between the individual and society, between gratifying our instincts and the demands of civilization, an image shared and articulated by both Freud and many modern Marxists.
