sive discussions of relevant issues and constructs, it lacks an adequate, ex-
plicit, dynamic, and unified organismic theory or framework that can explain
the ontogenetic evolution of motivation. By the termorganismicwe 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.
In this chapter, we sketch our idea of an organismic general model (or
framework) that can serve to address the analysis of human motivation from
a developmental organismic perspective. To this end, we describe some plau-
sible organismic processes and resources, we define with their help basic con-
cepts such as motive and specific interests, and use analytical methods that
can serve to clarify developmental timetables of many motivational con-
structs, as well as sources of individual differences. We illustrate some of
these ideas with our own and others’ data.
THE CAUSAL TEXTURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT:
ORGANISMIC SCHEMES
We focus first on epistemological problems relevant to motivational theory,
such as the nature of reality and of human activity (understood as goal-
directed interaction with situations, aimed to control or understand the ob-
jects, persons, or both therein; Leontiev, 1981). The question of motivation
concerns mechanisms and processes that can bridge the gap between a per-
son’s makeup (his or herpsychological organism) and the actual situation out
there, in order to explain the person’s agency and his or her implicit construal
of tasks and obligations. Kant (1965; Pascual-Leone, 1998) saw the schema
as the organism’s way of bridging the gap between the organism and its situa-
tional context as such, that is, the constraints–resistances of the actual situa-
tion. However schemas or schemes of Kant or Piaget are neither organismic
(i.e., embodied) nor situated (i.e., contextualized) enough to serve as tools in
motivational process analysis.
Motivation attempts to explain the “what,” “why,” and “where” of a per-
son’s more or less conscious praxis and practice. Bypraxiswe mean cognitive
or motor goal-directed actions addressed to the environment, to satisfy cen-
tral and intrinsic personal needs (i.e., affective goals).Practiceis similar to a
conscious or unconscious praxis that often uses automatized operations, and
is enacted to satisfy marginal and predominantly extrinsic needs or affective
goals. In these definitions,intrinsic(or endogenous) means stemming from
processes initiated by the organism itself;extrinsic(or exogenous) refers to
processes originally induced by others or by the situation. We callmoti-
vationally centralthose needs or affective goals that subjects address for their
198 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON