At the end of the third section of the preceding chapter, we pointed out how the major schools of psychology – psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cognitivism – presented some of the characteristics of teleonomic projects, meaning the repetition of constant factors and regularities. Furthermore, we showed how these psychological schools do not fully satisfy the teleonomic requirements, in that they tend not to express in their paradigms the possibility for autonomous morphogenesis, which is to say, the capacity for the self-generation of negentropic psychic states.

To the contrary, these schools emphasize homeostatic and mechanistic aspects of the psyche. For this very reason, such theories, at least as they present themselves to date, do not seem to be fully suited to satisfy the fundamental function of psychic processes as proposed and highlighted in the introductory sections of this volume. Once again, such a function consists in the regular replication of specific psychic states and, at the same time, in an ordered and self-determined evolution of the complexity of information contained in these same psychic processes, or connected to them. Fulfilling such tasks, psychological teleonomy becomes, as we have seen, the bridge between biological and cultural processes.

The theories presented in the last sections of the first chapter share instead a number of aspects that tend to better satisfy the teleonomic requirements concerning the increase of complexity.