Antropología tomista: hacia una nueva comprensión psíquica holística del hombre como Unidad Substancial, frente a la comprensión tradicional occidental biologicista y funcionalista contemporánea.

Abstract

The work presented below considers the anthropological understanding of man in the unity between soul and body suggested by St. Thomas Aquinas as a substantial unit. It tries to be a philosophical contribution so that both philosophy and psychology can appropriate Aquinas’s thought, who presents man as a “being” in Substantial Unity. His substantialist anthropological vision of an ontological nature can favour an enriching dialogue with the various psychological postures that explain a part of man and his behaviour. The place that St. Thomas assigns to man in the universe is central. Man is the microcosm, he is neither only body nor single soul, but rather a body informed by the spiritual soul as its substantial form. From this theory, an understanding of man is achieved that surpasses dualism and pluralism, perspectives of current anthropological explanation. The psychoanalytic, behavioural, constructionist proposal and other positions in psychology have sought an anthropological understanding mediated by its postulates, without generating a unitary understanding of man and linking him directly with the search for his identity having as an articulating element psychism as a concept that integrates internal and external elements of man. The proposal establish a dialogue between Thomistic posture and current currents around man’s psychic understanding.