Synonyms
Affiliation; Connectedness; Getting along; Love; Social interest
I have adopted the terms “agency” and “communion” to characterize two fundamental modalities in the existence of living forms, agency for the existence of an organism as an individual, and communion for the participation of the individual in some larger organism of which the individual is a part. Agency manifests itself in self-protection, self-assertion, and self-expansion; communion manifests itself in the sense of being at one with other organisms. Agency manifests itself in the formation of separations; communion in the lack of separations. Agency manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness; communion in contact, openness, and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master; communion in non-contractual cooperation. (Bakan 1966, pp. 14–15)
Introduction
In the mid-1960s, David Bakan introduced the term communion to psychology’s lexicon. Communion represents half of the “duality of human...
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Dunlop, W.L., McCoy, T.P., Hanley, G.E., Harake, N.R. (2020). Communion. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1218
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